
Computer Generated Math Paper makes it into Peer Reviewed Journal - jhull
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/10/nonsense-paper-accepted-by-mathematics-journal.html
======
kghose
It's not accepted. The referees were very kind and gave the benefit of doubt
to the authors and gave them the option of revising the paper.

I think the Journal should be lauded for being open minded but principled. I
think the authors should fess up and offer the reviewers a beer for wasting
their time.

PS. Original post <http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102>

PPS. Well, after reading the response letter it seems the Journal was kind of
eager to publish. In the Neurosciences I'm used to more guarded language from
editors even for papers that have basically been accepted.

~~~
anonymouz
The paper was accepted, under condition that these comments are addressed.
Considering that the paper contains no meaningful content whatsoever, it
should have been outright rejected.

It seems that the journal is one of a number of recent "low tier" (putting it
mildly) journals that mainly profit of the processing fee they collect to
publish the paper.

I doubt this could have gotten accepted, even conditionally, by a more
established journal with a reputation to lose.

~~~
im3w1l
Here is the paper in full:
[http://blog.richmond.edu/physicsbunn/2012/10/19/math-
journal...](http://blog.richmond.edu/physicsbunn/2012/10/19/math-journal-
publishes-computer-generated-fake-paper/)

Well, if they rewrote the abstract, and proved their results, it would have
meaningful content..

~~~
anonymouz
I've seen it. They'd have to rewrite the abstract, state an actual result,
prove it and rewrite everything in between. The "paper" is just grammatically
correct but non-sensical glibberish from start to end.

If a referee accepts this paper conditionally, he might as well accept a blank
page on condition that the author will put something there.

------
michaelhoffman
This isn't a pervasive problem in the peer-reviewed math literature. It is a
problem with one publisher that is widely regarded to lack legitimacy.

See <https://www.google.com/search?q=%22scirp%22+scam> for some examples.

~~~
kens
Yes, the journal has been labeled a money-making scam: if you need
publications (for your academic career), they'll publish your paper in
exchange for large publication fees. The "peer-reviews" are basically token
reviews. I don't think there's any larger meaning here about the state of
mathematics.

See one of the blog post comments for details:
[http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2012/10/17/paul-
taylor/stochastica...](http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2012/10/17/paul-
taylor/stochastically-orthogonal/comment-page-1/#comment-6010)

(And as random trivia, the four-color theorem was the first major theorem to
be proved using a computer. Based on the headline, I was expecting something
like that.)

~~~
001sky
_Neither Marcie Rathke nor the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople
is willing to pay the ‘processing charges’ levied by Advances in Pure
Mathematics, so we will never know if the work would actually have made it to
publication._

\-- How much $$, just out of curiosity?

~~~
omaranto
$500, see <http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102>

------
S4M
The tittle first mislead me because I thought somebody generated a theorem-
prover smart enough to find something worth publishing (note: I know nothing
about computer generated proofs of theorems).

After reading the "article" I found it obvious it was void of sense. "Let \rho
= A", what is A? And who on earth would bother to write 0 as tan(\intfy^{-1})
?? There are also proofs "left as an exercise to the reader"! Amongs many
others those are obvious clues that the article is just a joke.

But thanks to that I know that the journal "Advances in Pure Mathematics" is a
scam...

------
Strilanc
The title is misleading. I came in expecting a proof found by an automated
prover being explained by a natural language generator. Instead, it's just
another joke paper where meaningless content is generated by some random
process.

~~~
dhimes
I expected to see some mathematical theorem unexpectedly proved by Mathematica
or something.

------
icandoitbetter
How long before an ignorant humanities scholar writes a book claiming that the
"Rathke Affair" proves that all math is nonsense?

~~~
xaa
We have independent verification that math works, because it is used every day
in millions of companies to perform a variety of critical tasks.

The targets of the Sokal Affair were on much shakier ground to begin with.

~~~
001sky
Whether Academia is full of shit is irrelevant to the validity of mathematics.
That being said, the GP comment basically demonstrates a peculiar cognitive
bias. A variation of a logical fallacy: "I'm not dumb, therefore I never do
dumb things." Of which we see all too often grafted into politics: Viz:
Science is objective, therefore my (self-interested political) viewpoints are
also objective, infallible, and inevitably correct.

------
UrLicht
The university of southern north Dakota at hoople? Yeah, it doesn't exist.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._D._Q._Bach>

...making the whole thing satire.

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pfortuny
The reviewer did not even look at the references... They are certainly the
best part.

------
Dove
Not to worry. Someone with a graduate-level background in actual math won't
make it very far into the title before deciding the paper is nonsense.

After that, it's all fun and games trying to assign meanings to things.
"Arrows of Equations and Problems in Formal Applied PDE" sounds like what
happens when someone gets frustrated with their homework to me. ;)

I'm really impressed with the quality of the lorem ipsum, though. If you don't
actually read what it says, just kinda skim over the formatting, it's
surprisingly believable.

------
xyzzyz
Funny. One would imagine that filtering stuff like this should be very easy,
because stuff in math either makes sense, or not, at least to someone
knowledgeable in the field.

~~~
lotharbot
I propose a simple experiment:

Print out a copy of this paper. Take it to the nearest university campus. Ask
math grad students and profs to look it over. I suspect almost all of them
will ask if it's some kind of joke, or simply tell you it doesn't make any
sense.

That's the filter we expect to apply. But the journal this was submitted to
_doesn't use a math filter_ ; it uses a "did you pay me $500" filter, which
isn't really useful for identifying legitimate mathematics.

~~~
lotharbot
I performed a variant of my suggested experiment. I went on facebook and found
a friend of mine, who has a B.S. in mathematics and did some coursework toward
a Masters.

It took him about 5 minutes to identify it as a hoax. And he was distracted
(with facebook, football, and his 3 year old.)

He's how the exchange went:

12:11pm ME: tell me what you think of [http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2012/09/...](http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2012/09/mathgen-1389529747.pdf)

12:11pm HIM: How in-depth a review do you want?

12:12pm ME: just give me your first impressions

12:14pm HIM: My first thought: "Holy crap, there's a ton here I don't even
remember..."

12:14pm ME: second thought?

12:15pm HIM: Second thought: "Is this legit? It's all over the place..."

12:15pm ME: third thought?

12:16pm HIM: "This is starting to look like something thrown together to
appear like a legit math paper."

12:17pm ME: Thanks. That's adequate. It actually is.

12:17pm HIM: Yeah, I was about to say I was 100% certain after one more
glance.

EDIT: my wife and I both have advanced math degrees, and we spent the morning
laughing at this paper. But since we already knew it was a hoax from the HN
post, we weren't valid targets for this experiment. My friend didn't know
anything about it before this chat, so he was a valid experimental target. I
think his response is adequate to demonstrate that this paper wouldn't pass
peer review by actual mathematicians working for a legitimate journal.

~~~
Dove
_we spent the morning laughing at this paper_

And how. I still can't breathe quite right. I still think differentiable
category theory was my favorite bit, but I'll admit the recent paper by
Pythagoras has appeal.

------
StavrosK
It says "provisionally accepted". What's the provision?

~~~
ph0rcyas
That the only thing left to do is to pay the "processing fees".

~~~
StavrosK
Oh, sounds like a very prestigious journal.

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SagelyGuru
What should give you pause for thought is not so much the 'quality' of the
review but the fact that there is a ready market for such journals. Else they
would not exist.

What drives this market? Can it in any sense be said to be good and in public
interest?

------
Tycho
Reminds me of the story about someone submitting a fake or computer generated
paper on Derrida and deconstructionist analysis to a number of literary
journals and having it accepted. I can't find the link though, unfortunately.

~~~
robertskmiles
The Sokal Affair?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair>

------
pfortuny
Can it be that the journal reviews the papers using computer-generated
referees?

------
Evbn
Yes, a gobbledydook author (the program, not its creator) passed peer review
of gobbledygook reviewers.

The insinuation that the mathematical community at large had any involvement
in this self-proclaimed journal is false, and then headline is linkbait
unworthy of HNm

------
ph0rcyas
This finally happened. Narrow specialization at its best.

~~~
omaranto
No, that's not what happened: this journal is a scam, they publish anything
vaguely math paper-like in exchange for $500.

~~~
curiousdannii
Then why even bother giving a referee report? But I guess scammers do many
strange things...

~~~
omaranto
This sounds to me like asking "Why would a scammer do something that makes the
scam more plausible?". The answer is, of course, to make more people fall for
it. Their target is tiny (people that want to write math papers!), so they
need to give at least the appearance of being legit.

~~~
curiousdannii
It depends if the authors are in on the scam or not -- is it scamming authors
of their money, or scamming universities who are checking CVs?

