A 2019 research paper humorously investigated the possibility of creating invalid Perl programs through paint splatters, employing optical character recognition (OCR) software to analyze the results. The study found that a surprising 93% of paint splatters parsed as valid Perl programs, suggesting that it is challenging to create a paint splatter that does not constitute a valid Perl program. The authors presented seven examples of paint splatters that did not parse as valid Perl, providing a tongue-in-cheek answer to a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community, and the paper was subsequently published at the SIGBOVIK 2019 conference, where it won an "Unwitting Participation Ribbon" for its unique contribution to open science and procrastination.