arXiv vs. snarXiv

[steuard]

Entertainment of the week: arXiv vs. snarXiv. How well can you distinguish actual high-energy physics paper titles from computer generated fakes?

As every theoretical physicist knows, the arXiv.org preprint server is the go-to place for current research. (That "X" is supposed to be the Greek letter chi.) Essentially every string theory paper is posted there long before it's published, so active researchers check the new submission list daily.

The newly released snarXiv is "a ran­dom high-energy the­ory paper gen­er­a­tor incor­po­rat­ing all the lat­est trends, entropic rea­son­ing, and excit­ing mod­uli spaces." It generates titles, author lists, and abstracts (for now). Its creator goes on to explain that "The arXiv is sim­i­lar, but occa­sion­ally less ran­dom." His blog post (linked here) even goes on to suggest good uses for the snarXiv at each stage of your career. This is all absolutely hilarious to those of us who follow the arXiv for a living. For everyone else, it's a chance to laugh at us.

When I tried the arXiv vs. snarXiv quiz, I got to 10/10 and then stopped for fear of embarrassing myself if I eventually got one wrong.

Comments

[invisibor.livejournal.com]

This is a fun game. At some point in my High School classes I like to try and point out the importance of peer-review. I usually start with a paragraph from a crank and compare it to a journal paper. Since the are both incomprehensible to my students, it's nice to be able to explain why one is more "valuable" to the scientific community than the other. And, then, how you can find mnore of the latter and less of the former.