Since 2007, the Association for Computational Heresy has celebrated the sillier side of academic research through the annual SIGBOVIK conference. As their website states, “SIGBOVIK is an evening of tongue-in-cheek academic presentations, a venue for silly ideas and/or executions.” This interdisciplinary computer science conference invites three categories of research: “joke realizations of joke ideas, joke realizations of serious ideas, and serious realizations of joke ideas.” While all three quadrants offer exciting opportunities, I’m particularly intrigued by the last one: serious realizations of joke ideas. Fully understanding this quadrant requires understanding the two parts individually.
The first part, serious realizations, is relatively straightforward. Given some idea, a serious realization would offer results that answer some underlying questions or issues. One fantastic example of a serious realization is GradIEEEnt half decent, published in a previous SIGBOVIK. In GradIEEEnt half decent, Dr. Tom Murphy explores the idea of how computer rounding errors could be used on purpose. His realization includes creating a non-linear activation function using linear operations. He evaluates the effectiveness of his activation function on standard machine learning benchmark datasets like MNIST and CIFAR-10, comparing performance to other activation functions. Not all serious realizations require experimental results, but they do require going beyond just the initial idea.
The second part, joke ideas, is less clear-cut. Plenty of ideas that start as jokes are later taken more seriously. For example, Schrödinger’s Cat was originally used to poke fun at the absurdity of quantum models of macroscopic objects. This ridiculous idea of a cat in a box is now the most well-known analogy for measurement in quantum systems. Similarly, Fred Hoyle coined the term “Big Bang” because he was poking fun at the idea of the universe expanding from a singularity. He never did accept the theory, but today, supporters and critics all use the term “Big Bang” seriously. Joke ideas frequently become serious, making them much more difficult to define.
While Schrödinger and Hoyle made jokes out of disbelief, not all joke ideas come from disagreement. Jokes can come from a variety of sources, but for the purposes of SIGBOVIK and similar venues, there is one common unifier among joke ideas: they would not receive funding. This argument requires establishing a few premises. First, I will use the terms “joke” and “serious” as opposites, so not serious ideas are joke ideas. Next, it’s reasonable to assume that researchers publishing in most journals and conferences are addressing serious ideas. Researchers can do that work as their job because it is funded. Since funding agencies decide whether a researcher’s proposal gets funded, funding agencies thus decide if the work is serious. Note that I am not arguing that every serious idea gets funding. Instead, if a funding agency funds a proposal, then the idea is serious. By the contrapositive, if the idea is not serious, then it will not be funded.
Using funding as this guiding principle elucidates how narrow the range of serious ideas really is. Joke ideas aren’t necessarily useless, they’re just a large portion of the ideas that academia doesn’t care about. Exploring them seriously can create opportunities for knowledge that would have never been known before. Research is about pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, and that can be done in all directions. I truly enjoy doing research, and while the majority of my work is focused on serious ideas, I’ve been exploring some joke ideas too. Most recently, I wrote a paper that formally analyzes bread slicing with rigorous mathematics. I don’t claim that it offers much utility to society, but it’s a nice piece of absurdist humor that pairs well with this summary video.
SIGBOVIK is a fantastic venue for exploring serious realizations of joke ideas, but I would love to see this occurring more broadly. Granted, my worldview as a computer science research student is vastly limited, but most academics don’t seem to put effort into their silly ideas. If you have the time and resources to do so, why not? Push the boundaries of human knowledge, even in strange directions. Explore silly ideas with the effort you put into your publications. Take your jokes seriously.