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This may sound trite, but this is why science is based on math, and not code. Math results can be fully reproduced from a paper document no matter how old it is
by plaidfuji 8y ago
This may sound trite, but this is why science is based on math, and not code. Math results can be fully reproduced from a paper document no matter how old it is. That is the point of math. Until code reaches that level of self consistency and rigor, no one is going to waste their time building a friggin virtual machine for their one-off incremental molecular dynamics result that all of 2 people will try to reproduce.
- avip 8y ago"Science" is not discussed here, but academic research publishing. And to state that "Academic research papers are based on math" is, lacking a more polite term, false.
- JD557 8y agoThere are some cases where math alone is not enough to reproduce the results though. It's easy for a paper to say something like "pick the set of N points that minimizes `median(f(x))`" without saying how the points were chosen (gradient descent? simulated annealing? brute force? some analytical method?). What happens if you pick one optimization method and your results are different than the ones in the paper? There's no way for you to know if the paper is wrong or if you just picked the wrong method.