[Insight-users] NEWS: "If you're going to do good science, release the computer code too"

[Luis Ibanez]

http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/02/09/1336250/Call-For-Scientific-Research-Code-To-Be-Released

"Professor Ince, writing in the Guardian,
has issued a call for scientists to make
the code they use in the course of their
research publicly available.

He focuses specifically on the topical
controversies in climate science, and
concludes with the view that researchers
who are able but unwilling to release
programs they use should not be regarded
as scientists.

Quoting:

'There is enough evidence for us to regard a
lot of scientific software with worry. For example
Professor Les Hatton, an international expert in
software testing resident in the Universities of
Kent and Kingston, carried out an extensive
analysis of several million lines of scientific code.

He showed that the software had an unacceptably
high level of detectable inconsistencies. For example,
interface inconsistencies between software modules
which pass data from one part of a program to another
occurred at the rate of one in every seven interfaces
on average in the programming language Fortran, and
one in every 37 interfaces in the language C.

This is hugely worrying when you realise that just one
error — just one — will usually invalidate a computer
program.

What he also discovered, even more worryingly, is that
the accuracy of results declined from six significant
figures to one significant figure during the running of
programs.'"


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http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/05/science-climate-emails-code-release
"If you're going to do good science, release the computer code too"

Programs do more and more scientific work - but you need to be able to
check them as well as the original data, as the recent row over climate
change documentation shows


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The situation is by no means bad across academia. A number of journals,
for example those in the area of economics and econometrics, insist on
an author lodging both the data and the programs with the journal before
publication. There's also an object lesson in a landmark piece of mathematics:
the proof of the four colour conjecture by Apel and Haken. They proved a
longstanding hypothesis which suggested - but had never been able to
show and so elevate to a theory - that in any map, the regions can be
coloured using at most four colours so that no two adjacent regions have
the same colour. Their proof was controversial in that instead of an elegant
mathematical exposition, they partly used a computer program. Their work
was criticised for inelegance, but it was correct and the computer program
was published for checking.