Just to complete the circle, I was in touch with the author of the Postmodernism Server when it was being created — in its original version, you’ll sometimes see works by “Porter” in the bibliography; that’s me. It’s a small world. (In fact, I went to high school with one of the pioneers of small-world theory…)

In arXiv vs. snarXiv, the game is to say which of two article titles is from the real arXiv, a \“highly-automated electronic archive and distribution server for research articles\”, and which is from the spoof snarXiv, a \“ran­dom high-energy the…

I like John’s idea too — it might be fun to implement. I also think there’s a lot of room just for optimizing the snarXiv to sound more like the arXiv. Currently, its vocabulary and sentence structures are limited to whatever popped into my head while I was writing the grammar. There’s no sense in which the adjectives that appear, for instance, represent a complete list of common adjectives in arXiv titles. And the abstracts grammar definitely doesn’t have enough flexibility to mimic everything that people tend to write. My sense is that many who figured out how to beat the snarXiv simply learned what it could spit out and what it couldn’t, and that was basically enough to distinguish it from the arXiv every time.

Maybe I’ll find the time at some point to make improvements to the snarXiv grammar myself, but I was kind of hoping that some nerdy people might want to help out (I’m supposed to be doing research, you see :) ). The grammar is freely available online, and this post has instructions on how to set up the actual generator from the grammar.