Friday, April 15, 2005
Random Paper Generator
A friend emailed me this link to a CNN.com story about some MIT computer science students I find myself very jealous of. It seems they developed a program that would generate a grammatically correct, jargon-filled research paper that makes absolutely no sense. The text is completely random and completely meaningless. They took the paper and submitted it to a computer science conference notorious for excessive solicitations for papers, and they were invited to come to Florida to present their gibberish.
Right now, as a 3L in the final weeks of my final semester of school, my life is completely encompassed in writing my 3L paper. This is a requirement for graduation at Harvard Law School, and is supposed to be some sort of capstone experience for law school as a whole. Like most law-related articles, it's supposed to be so long it becomes meaningless (~60 pages), and it's supposed to be filled with all sorts of legal jargon and heavy footnoting.
Of course, I have my suspicions that this 3L paper requirement isn't all it's cracked up to be. For example, if you submit your proposal to the Registrar's Office after October 10, the school catalog says that you will be assessed a fine, increasing in magnitude the more you delay. At the time I submitted my proposal, the fine level was $50. I have seen my term bill recently, and there is no such charge. I will never pay the fine, and I feel fine about that.
Even worse, there's a rumor that if you submit a single sheet of paper with your name and "3L Paper" written on it and nothing else, you will get credit for the requirement and be allowed to graduate. I don't know about that, but I do know that one inventive friend of mine got away with writing a screenplay based on a concept he's already working on. He spent two or three hours writing fiction, and I'm spending countless days looking up how to cite House of Representatives reports in the Bluebook.
So what I'd really like right now is a random law paper generator. The specific parameters would have to be different than that used by the MIT people for their computer science paper, but the concept would be the same. Footnotes citing random cases, incomprehensible legal jargon, and about 15 times the length (the bogus paper accepted by the conference is only four pages long). Are there any computer science geeks out there who want to help me out, or do I have to go over to MIT and ask a stranger?
Right now, as a 3L in the final weeks of my final semester of school, my life is completely encompassed in writing my 3L paper. This is a requirement for graduation at Harvard Law School, and is supposed to be some sort of capstone experience for law school as a whole. Like most law-related articles, it's supposed to be so long it becomes meaningless (~60 pages), and it's supposed to be filled with all sorts of legal jargon and heavy footnoting.
Of course, I have my suspicions that this 3L paper requirement isn't all it's cracked up to be. For example, if you submit your proposal to the Registrar's Office after October 10, the school catalog says that you will be assessed a fine, increasing in magnitude the more you delay. At the time I submitted my proposal, the fine level was $50. I have seen my term bill recently, and there is no such charge. I will never pay the fine, and I feel fine about that.
Even worse, there's a rumor that if you submit a single sheet of paper with your name and "3L Paper" written on it and nothing else, you will get credit for the requirement and be allowed to graduate. I don't know about that, but I do know that one inventive friend of mine got away with writing a screenplay based on a concept he's already working on. He spent two or three hours writing fiction, and I'm spending countless days looking up how to cite House of Representatives reports in the Bluebook.
So what I'd really like right now is a random law paper generator. The specific parameters would have to be different than that used by the MIT people for their computer science paper, but the concept would be the same. Footnotes citing random cases, incomprehensible legal jargon, and about 15 times the length (the bogus paper accepted by the conference is only four pages long). Are there any computer science geeks out there who want to help me out, or do I have to go over to MIT and ask a stranger?
Comments:
Taking this one step further, what if the computer generated something brilliant that someone else wanted to cite. To whom do you give credit?
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