3 ms·
Is that a direct application of the paper or something else? (sorry I didn't read it) Just wondering because this rule of thumb sounds intuitively wrong to me.
by uyt 6y ago
Is that a direct application of the paper or something else? (sorry I didn't read it)
Just wondering because this rule of thumb sounds intuitively wrong to me. Depending on the difficulty of the bugs and the skill levels of the experts, it seems possible for them to find every "easy" bug at least twice while having none of them finding the hardest bug even once. (real world example would be some obscure zero-day security bug)
- bugzz 6y agoagreed, I thought of the same issue. Seems like there has to be some assumption about even difficulty of finding bugs / catching species of birds
- tgb 6y agoI should have said "at least until" rather than "until", sorry. It's from a result that predates the paper, due to Fisher (using butterflies, not code bugs). The actual guarantee from the result is not that the number of unobserved "species" is small, but that the total population of all unobserved species is small. If you go back to the birds example, then you could say something like "at most 0.1% of all birds are from species that we haven't identified" but maybe those 0.1% of birds are from a million different species each with incredibly tiny populations. In the code bug example, the very rare species would be the bugs that are very unlikely to be found, i.e. it's more about estimating how many more bugs you will find if you continue to analyze it than how many are really there.