I remember first day doing some work as consultant with JPL for Cassini and a sim finished just before lunch and my collaborator says “huh, that’s interesting, the bug we have been reproducing for the last week suddenly disappeared! Case closed! Well let’s go...”. Being a naive youngster I say “wait, don’t we want to rerun the sim?? Maybe we need to tweak the parameters, etc, etc”He shakes his head knowingly, says something to the effect of “no time for all that, son” and off we go.
In the end he was right, Cassini performed wonderfully, proof in the pudding and all that...but still can’t help think that it was in many ways a lot of lucky coin tosses!
jschwartzi|6 years ago