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ApostleMatthew | 7 years ago

My PhD adviser was a good friend of Chandler's, and a lot of my doctoral work was based on previous work done in his lab. I'm honestly really surprised one of his students/post-docs made a mistake of this magnitude -- generating a velocity distribution which does not follow the Boltzmann distribution is not something I'd expect to be a result of code coming from his lab. But we all make mistakes, and this really just lends more weight to the idea that all code used in producing published results should be posted along with the article itself, just like data sets often are (at least from studies with government funding).

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ur-whale|7 years ago

Refusing to share their code falls under the "we all make mistakes" umbrella you think?

whateveryou381|7 years ago

Sharing code is not always the answer. Independent thinking implies independence, in code and more abstractly.

The real 'mistake' is allowing the drama to escalate to the point that it is toxic. People who are truly interested don't care about who is right and who is wrong.

When disagreements like this come up, having common and good test cases are probably the most important (and is indeed the way in which the problem, generation of non-Boltzman behavior, was found).

In the end ST2 itself is flawed, and Princeton admitted that the discussion of water was not significantly advanced through this drama. Is it worth it?

Understanding the argument and its importance should be the focus.

s-shellfish|7 years ago

Sharing code can be just as confusing as it is enlightening.

ApostleMatthew|7 years ago

Oh, I meant making the error in the code fell under the we all make mistakes. Not the refusing to share it.