Ah, Computer Science humor: SCIGen is a software for the random generation of Computer Science papers, using a hand-tweaked context-free grammar. Similar things have been seen elsewhere, but the MIT students behind SCIGen actually managed to get its paper “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy” accepted to WMSCI 2005 as a non-reviewed paper.

With the help of donations, a $390 registration fee was raised so that the paper at the conference. However, since it was revealed to WMSCI that it was in fact a fake, the conference refunded their fee and turned down the paper after all. Not to be deterred, the students sought more donations (and received them from 165 benefactors) so that an independent technical session with randomly generated papers could be held at the same location as the WMSCI. A full record is available as downloadable video.

Source code for SCIGen is freely available under the GPL license.