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It's suppose to be an educational tool - bioinformatics is more than writing programs to add up numbers it's about understanding the science behind it. So I di
by DrScientist 7y ago
It's suppose to be an educational tool - bioinformatics is more than writing programs to add up numbers it's about understanding the science behind it.
So I didn't like the question because it treated the problem as a simple 'write a program to add up a list of numbers, based on a lookup table',rather than address the real science issues around protein mass.
( Here the real challenges actually come from post-translational modifications - which makes mass matching a very hard problem indeed - with lots of challenges for anyone in computer science )
- eesmith 7y agoIn my top-level coment I asked: How (in)correct are the other answers? I-am-not-a-bioinformatics-programmer. As a variation, how many other questions do you not like? http://rosalind.info/problems/hamm/ http://rosalind.info/problems/hamm/ computes the Hamming distance between two strings, using the simplification that only point mutations are important. This is of course not a true reflection of the science behind comparing two DNA strings. Do you therefore also not like that question? Which others don't you like, because of simplifications they don't explain? As an education tool, is it not useful to discard complexity in the process of bootstraping towards the full details? Ha! I had heard the phrase "lie-to-children" before, which seemed relevant to this thread. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children says: > A lie-to-children (plural lies-to-children) is a simplified explanation of technical or complex subjects as a teaching method for children and laypeople. The technique has been incorporated by academics within the fields of biology, evolution, bioinformatics and the social sciences.