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> Science can progress even without software - the only difference that software makes is rate of progress and its cost. Depends on the science. Facial recogni
by lmkg 15y ago
> Science can progress even without software - the only difference that software makes is rate of progress and its cost.
Depends on the science. Facial recognition software? That requires software to make progress.
> Did you ask yourself why ? Maybe, because what's now, just works for them ? I didn't see any description of problems on this page, that this manifesto wants to solve.
It is usually to the benefit of the individual researcher to keep the code under wraps, but not to the benefit of the field of research. A researcher benefits from generating results. They do not benefit from other people being able to verify their results. In fact, they may even benefit from raising the barrier to entry, as it makes their own results more important in the field.
> The code is not as important as descriptions of algorithms, and the ideas behind code
In theory, this should be 100% true. In practice, results are determined as much by parameters, implementation choices, and flat-out bugs, as they are by the algorithms and the big ideas. I absolutely agree that people should re-implement the algorithms, rather than share the bugs (Dijkstra wrote against this). However, what happens when you find a discrepancy between your results and what a paper said? Without having access to the original source code, you can't figure out what caused the difference. Anecdotally, my girlfriend has been in this situation before--she couldn't replicate a (computer vision) result from someone else's paper. The original author was reticent to share their own code, so she didn't know whether the difference was a bug on her end, a bug on their end, or a platform difference. Open source code may have helped answer that question.
- noodly 15y ago> Depends on the science. Facial recognition software? That requires software to make progress. Like every computation - you can simulate it on paper :) > It is usually to the benefit of the individual researcher to keep the code under wraps, but not to the benefit of the field of research. A researcher benefits from generating results. They do not benefit from other people being able to verify their results. In fact, they may even benefit from raising the barrier to entry, as it makes their own results more important in the field. It's to the benefit not only of the individual researcher, but also of the institutions - because they don't need to upkeep code repositories - so publishing is not as costly as it could be, when releasing source code was mandatory. From field of research point of view - as I wrote earlier - - source code is not important. It may be useful in some situations but only for individual researcher (like your girlfriend). > Without having access to the original source code, you can't figure out what caused the difference. I think that's good reason to share the code or for discussion between researchers - but I don't think it's enough to make sharing code mandatory, because your girlfriend could for example write article pointing out differences between her result and previous result(s) and be done (assuming she was certain about her result), without ever looking at others source codes.