If you're going to do good science, release the computer code too

Re:If you're going to do good science, release the computer ... by btilly on Monday February 08, 2010 @01:19PM (#1110280)

As silly as the explanation was, there is actually a good reason to re-implement. And that is that if nobody does, then any bug in the original code will survive to cause problems with nobody knows how many results before anyone catches the bug.

Reimplementing from scratch then comparing with the original gives an opportunity to find such bugs.

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Re:If you're going to do good science, release the computer ... by barrkel on Monday February 08, 2010 @01:30PM (#1110303)

Yes, but such arguments apply at different levels of abstraction.

I doubt one would rewrite the OS, compiler or runtime libraries because they couldn't be trusted; though all these can also have bugs.

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Re:If you're going to do good science, release the computer ... by btilly on Monday February 08, 2010 @02:08PM (#1110393)

One would probably not rewrite them. However people both can and do take their software and run it on a different operating system, compiled with a different compiler, linked with different run-time libraries, on a different type of hardware. And yes, I've seen bad software assumptions flushed out by doing so. (Don't use floating point for complex financial calculations please. OK??)

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Re:If you're going to do good science, release the computer ... by philwelch on Monday February 08, 2010 @03:09PM (#1110536)

Not just bugs, but also ambiguities in specification, which helps us to refine our higher level specifications.

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