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A comment on A Polynomial Time Bounded-Error Quantum Algorithm for Boolean Satisfiability. Parent comment

Re:A Polynomial Time Bounded-Error Quantum Algorithm for Boo... by anfedorov on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @11:38AM (#9930234)
An expert would be able to skim it, recognize the path of reasoning as something he's seen a before, and narrow down on the error quickly. Reasoning about something by how many "waves in the community" it has made is a deference of personal judgement to the social network an individual is embedded in, which is a useful shortcut when you are not an expert relative to your peers, but dangerous set of mind to operate in for any lengthy amount of time, as it can be the basis of cults and the like.
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Re:A Polynomial Time Bounded-Error Quantum Algorithm for Boo... by evanpw on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @01:56PM (#9931203)
> An expert would be able to skim it, recognize the path of reasoning as something he's seen a before, and narrow down on the error quickly.

This is almost exactly equivalent to saying that an expert programmer should be able to determine whether an unfamiliar, complicated code base contains a bug by skimming the source. The hard bugs are going to be subtle.

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Re:A Polynomial Time Bounded-Error Quantum Algorithm for Boo... by anfedorov on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @09:19PM (#9933411)
Not at all equivalent, because code isn't meant to be human readable, but computer interpretable. Because of these different goals, computer code is actually quite a bit harder to read than a well structured academic paper. I think programmers have a lot to learn about logical structure from writing meant to be read by humans [1].

Note how many people on this thread seem to be understanding and discussion its contents, whereas if I were to post 13 pages of "unfamiliar, complicated code" that claimed to do something, I can't imagine anyone would help me debug it.

1. Knuth expounds on this idea here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

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Re:A Polynomial Time Bounded-Error Quantum Algorithm for Boo... by irljf on Friday July 24, 2015 @10:35AM (#9942245)
I agree, but not all bugs are subtle. This seems to be the equivalent to someone having trouble with "hello world" because they forgot to include iostream.
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Re:A Polynomial Time Bounded-Error Quantum Algorithm for Boo... by ejk314 on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @02:58PM (#9931591)
> complicated code base

So then the answer is certainly "yes" with the same level of certainty that algorias is claiming. Large, complicated solutions are inherently likely to have subtle flaws.

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