snarXiv

snarXiv
URL http://snarXiv.org/
Commercial? No
Type of site Humor
Available language(s) English
Created by David Simmons-Duffin
Launched March 2010
Current status Online

snarXiv is a website spoofing the high-energy physics section (hep-th) of the popular electronic scientific paper repository arXiv. It was created in March 2010 by David Simmons-Duffin, a 3rd year Ph.D. student at Harvard University studying theoretical high-energy physics. The name snarXiv is a contraction of the words "snarky" and "arXiv".

Contents

Description

“ The snarXiv is a ran­dom high-energy the­ory paper gen­er­a­tor incor­po­rat­ing all the latest trends, entropic rea­son­ing, and excit­ing mod­uli spaces. The arXiv is sim­i­lar, but occasion­ally less ran­dom.[1] ”

The titles and abstracts of fake papers are generated using context-free grammar. The implementation uses Perl and OCaml, with source files posted on the website itself. Visitors are encouraged to play the game of arXiv vs. snarXiv: they are presented with a series of plausible-sounding pairs of titles and need to determine which of them is real. The program keeps the score, making snarky comments ranging from "Nobel Prize winner" for 100% success rate to "Crackpot", "9th year grad student" and "Worse than a monkey" for being wrong most of the time.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ The snarXiv — 10 March 2010, at David Simmons-Duffin's blog

References

External links