A reprise of the Social Text affair.

You may fondly recall Alan Sokal's experiement in cultural studies, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" . I know that I do. Sokal wrote a bunch of "fashionable nonsense" and got it published in the 1996 spring/summer issue of "Social Text".

Now CNN is reporting, "two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with 'context-free grammar,' charts and diagrams."

One of the papers was published.

Arvin Tseng wonders if this means the Turning test has been passed.