I herebey nominate this "flame" for the Quote of the Year Award. More seriously : rjf is probably right in stating that a mathematical error is more likely to be detected by mathematicians rather than "results-oriented" people : in most *practical* cases, an approximation will not be practically distinguishable from the exact results, but still lead to possible catastrophe. Furthermore, most "results-oriented" people will happily sacrifice correctness on the altar of practicality.
And when practicality includes social or political feasibility, the sacricice has dire onsequences (yes, economists, I'm looking at you : Forty years of "unexpected consequences" and still no incentive to revise your postulates... -- Emmanuel Charpentier Le dimanche 26 octobre 2014 16:46:54 UTC+1, rjf a écrit : > > This article is also discussed in another thread .. Trio . > . > Depending on what you are doing with the results of any computation, it > may be prudent to verify the results. I don't know that CAS are especially > more prone to bugs, but it may be that CAS are more likely to come up > with results that can be disproved, thereby revealing a bug. Or what > is sometimes referred to as a "feature". > > For example, if a weather-prediction program had a bug in it that caused > it to predict incorrectly 5% of the time, it might take a while to even > notice. > > <flame> > Fortunately, the result of many computations with CAS are of > no consequence whatsoever. > </flame> > > > > On Thursday, October 23, 2014 6:23:42 PM UTC-7, kcrisman wrote: >> >> Feature article in the Notices: >> http://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf >> The point, as the authors say, is not about any one system; as we know, >> any nontrivial software (including good ol' Sage) has plenty of bugs. >> Happy reading! >> - kcrisman >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
