So I've been deep in a FORTRAN program for decoding an amateur radio mode called FT8. I was going to recommend this to the supercomputing challenge student that Stephen is advising, because it's used for multi-senders/multi-listeners on a single audio channel, but I'm glad/sad I looked into it first because it's a mess. The astrophysicist and Nobelist Joe Taylor at Princeton has been working on various low power low baud communication amateur radio protocols for decades now and they're all in this source tar ball, the protocols, the encoders, the decoders, the programs, the libraries, all the false starts, and every simulator anyone ever thought of making. And then there's the Qt user interface that someone else layered on to the package.
So I'm picking my way through this wasteland of living, dead, and zombie code to follow the thread of one program that's embedded in it. My FORTRAN is very rusty, and they've redefined the language a bit since the 1970's. But I'm getting the gist of it as I muck along. Programming is communication of intent to make a computation, often thwarted. Thwarted by the programmer's communication skills, technical skills, the tools available, the programming language, the skills of the previous programmer on the project, the legacy cruft that might have to be preserved, and all the usual woes of all other modes of communication. I have some notes in front of me which demonstrated that I didn't divide 58 by 2 correctly on the first try and spent a half an hour figuring out that was the problem. Minor set back compared to my efforts to imagine belief propagation. Who would guess that belief propagation is how communication protocols get decoded? -- rec --
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