Posted on 05/20/2020 9:56:15 AM PDT by grundle
Imperial College’s modelling... could go down in history as the most devastating software mistake of all time, in terms of economic costs and lives lost.
... those of us with a professional and personal interest in software development have studied the code on which policymakers based their fateful decision to mothball our multi-trillion pound economy and plunge millions of people into poverty and hardship. And we were profoundly disturbed at what we discovered. The model appears to be totally unreliable and you wouldn’t stake your life on it.
Imperial’s model appears to be based on a programming language called Fortran, which was old news 20 years ago and, guess what, was the code used for Mariner 1. This outdated language contains inherent problems with its grammar and the way it assigns values, which can give way to multiple design flaws and numerical inaccuracies. One file alone in the Imperial model contained 15,000 lines of code.
Try unravelling that tangled, buggy mess, which looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming. Industry best practice would have 500 separate files instead. In our commercial reality, we would fire anyone for developing code like this and any business that relied on it to produce software for sale would likely go bust.
The approach ignores widely accepted computer science principles known as “separation of concerns”, which date back to the early 70s and are essential to the design and architecture of successful software systems. The principles guard against what developers call CACE: Changing Anything Changes Everything.
Without this separation, it is impossible to carry out rigorous testing of individual parts to ensure full working order of the whole.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
computer models are always “best guesses” They are not scientific
GIGO applies here garbage in garbage out
No, there’s far more incomprehensible, political and asinine “climate-change” models out there.
“Neil Ferguson’s Imperial model could be the most devastating software mistake of all time”
I suspect that it was not a mistake.
FORTRAN has nothing to do with any problem.
This author is nuts.
Characterizing this as a "mistake" is extremely generous.
How is such a model used?
It is simple. The "expert" runs the model multiple times.
They may tweak inputs a bit if the results don't "look right".
When the results "look right" (confirm the "expert's opinion"), they are accepted and treated as gospel.
It is the way it works.
“I suspect that it was not a mistake.”
I believe your suspicions are spot on.
Neil Ferguson is getting major league high fives from the Deep State. The Wuhan Flu has been their most effective weapon yet in their fight for global domination. Don’t you worry about Professor Ferguson. He’s being richly compensated for his statistical “mistake”!
Fortran is so 1970s. However, it’s kind of a strange avenue of attack.
The results it produces are wrong, plain and simple, so who really cares how it was developed?
There’s COBOL stuff out there that’s as bad or even worse and COBOL programmers are dying off.
As someone who has been a meteorologist for 32 years - THAT is a stupid - ignorant statement. Computer models are based on math and science. Some are crap and some are good. Each model has its bias - and some are good in certain situations - and some are bad for others.
I spend an entire career making forecasts and briefing 3 & 4-star generals and presidents on what computer models said...based on their science and math.
Where’s the quality control?
One “model”?
Was this critiqued? Peer reviewed? If so by whom?
Good grief, I swear I NEVER Thought I’d see such incompetence and evil
God Bless The Greatest Generation and before, what a mess your kids and grandkids Yo Boomers and GenXers have made of what you pieced together winning WW I and II
This was not a mistake. It was a lying model just like they use for climate change.
It’s possible to write clean, clear code in Fortran, but the language doesn’t make that easy. I’m surprised that anyone would choose Fortran for anything other than simple mathematical problems.
But the problem seems to be an inability to program, rather than the language per se.
I googled “FORTRAN Assigning values error” and got result after result after result of hits talking about the errors and pitfalls of assigning values in FORTRAN.
I think using FORTRAN is a symptom of the problem, not the main problem.
That’s my take.
Was in an honest error or a deliberate manipulation?
Does anybody remember the Hockey Stick model?
It could be the most devastating mistake of all time, but then it has to be a mistake doesn’t it? I don’t see how it can be anything but deliberate.
Now, if the program was written as one big main program, yeah, that's a problem. But I think the problem is not so much the coding as it is the assumptions underlying the algorithm (otherwise known as garbage in-garbage out).
Problem is trying to factor in trillions of dollars and how to disperse it (to drug companies and politicians, etc.) as part of the COVID spread model.
That is what is causing the Stack Overflows.
computer models are always “best guesses” They are not scientific
GIGO applies here garbage in garbage out
The dangers of “models” in the modern world is they are used as justification for major decisions. In the scientific method, the projections of any model are nothing more than a hypothesis. A hypothesis is not a fact until it is tested, peer reviewed, and it can be tested by others or reflected by reality.
Climate change or global warming is a hypothesis based on models and it has led to draconian and severe policies justified not by facts or real data, but solely supported by flawed models that have continually been wrong. This hypothesis has cost us a huge amount of money and lost economic output and led to poor policy decisions.
We now have seen the same thing play out in a few short months with this “pandemic”. Same bad models driving policy decisions leading to the same bad result.
The models were wrong about everything - ventilators, projected deaths, hospitals overwhelmed, etc etc etc. Sadly, there is no introspection over this as our media and panickcrats are on to the next dire projection.... i.e. - the resurgence in the fall, round 2, etc etc, all based on the same models.
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