I have Reviewed Ferguson's Code - It's a Joke

Armstrong Economics ^ | May, 8, 2020 | Martin Armstrong

[11th_VA]

to many GOTO statements ?

[11th_VA]

I would say anyone developing in FORTRAN in these days is a retarded.

Hey - I resemble those comments ... just sayin ...

[familyop]

More than 5 million Americans will be infected with coronavirus and 290,000 will die by the end of July if social distancing isn’t adhered to, according to COVID-19 model
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8340325/5million-Americans-infected-COVID-19-July-model-shows.html

[Dr. Sivana]

I would say anyone developing in FORTRAN in these days is a retarded.

Or, he may be working on a large existing code base. Right now a number of states need COBOL programmers for their existing unemployment software. I wouldn't call those programmers retarded, but rather well remunerated at times.

[semimojo]

I have little respect for what you refer to as epidemiologist, or any medical or scientific specialty, who would use 'limited data' to wreck entire societies for their own vanity.

And yet you're unable to propose an alternative.

[Magnum44]

There are many alternatives. I am living one of them by ignoring most of this garbage and leaving people to make up their own minds.

I am not going to write a book of alternatives for you. Are you just lazy or have no imagination of your own?

[semimojo]

Are you just lazy or have no imagination of your own?

Both at times, I'm sure.

But this isn't about me, it's about the public officials who have to make policy, pass laws, plan for medical resources, decide whether to quarantine people coming in from China, etc.

They're going to make decisions whether we like it or not, and I want them to be as informed as possible.

If Boris Johnson asked you "OK, if we don't do anything how bad could this get?" what would you do? Shrug and advise him to ignore this garbage?

I'd rather have him get advice from someone who's studied infectious diseases and their spread professionally and tries to use that knowledge, however imperfect, to offer some guidance.

[Magnum44]

Fauci and company offered their guidance. Now they need to go away. And your defending the actions of bureaucrats who advised a complete shutdown of the economy based on their so called expertise demonstrates that you put way too much faith in government and not nearly enough in your own common sense, if you think you have that. I got fed up with COVID about three weeks into February.

[mewzilla]

What if Ferguson screwed up on purpose...

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Not quite the same

Science has advanced beyond fartran.

[Dr. Sivana]

Science has advanced beyond fartran.

It has advanced beyond COBOL, as well. If you are simply doing calculations, you don't need a bunch of object oriented GUI tools, etc. To this day, Fortran is one of the fastest languages available.

All languages either compile or interpret down to machine level code. Just because another language has more features, or lends itself to more structured programming by itself does not make another language unusable or even obsolete.

To this day, physicists are STILL learning Fortran in grad school in order to access a lot of well-written legacy code.

[Paladin2]

“I did my own projections on the back of an envelope.”

Turn the back of the envelop upside-down.

Trace the edge of the flap.

Done.

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Legacy code, not new code.

You said it yourself. Shut down the world economy based on this?

[Dr. Sivana]

You said it yourself. Shut down the world economy based on this?

Legacy code is not intrinsically bad code, it is not even necessarily obsolete code. We did not shut down the economy because of a program written in Fortran. We shut down the economy because of a poorly written program. Bad programs are being written today in C++ and Python. Excellent code is still running in assembler, Fortran and COBOL.

I am sure some of the climate models that are always wrong were not written in Fortran, but they just as messed up.

[logi_cal869]

Cautioning those who wish to maintain credibility when confronting the left:

Do NOT cite Martin Armstrong to denigrate Ferguson's code.

I had saved this post's citation for later research and discovered the following (in a mere 60 seconds) of some background:

"In September 1999, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission prosecuted Armstrong for fraud. He was imprisoned for over seven years for civil contempt of court, one of the longest-running cases of civil contempt in American legal history. In August 2006, Armstrong pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit fraud and began a five-year sentence. Armstrong appeared in a 2015 documentary titled “The Forecaster” regarding his mathematical model and prosecution. [4],[5], [11]"

https://www.desmogblog.com/martin-armstrong

This NYT article makes the following citation:

"All told, by the time Mr. Armstrong is released, he will have served 12 years for orchestrating what prosecutors called a $3 billion Ponzi scheme through his investment fund, Princeton Economics International."

There are allegations that Armstrong was an insider with knowledge of gold market manipulation, but without hard evidence such allegations must reside in the same folder as The Clinton Body Count and, IMHO, citations of Armstrong pertaining to his "analysis" of Ferguson's computer code should be avoided.

In fact, there are other, potentially-valid sources of citation for analysis of Ferguson's code. Unfortunately, they are behind paywalls:

Neil Ferguson's Imperial model could be the most devastating software mistake of all time

Corona modeling was "worst software bug ever"

Perhaps a lurking FReeper can shed some light on the content via a friendly source with subscription access???

In closing, I cite the only valid analysis I could source for Imperial College's code (of which the source code is still not released):

Code Review of Ferguson’s Model

Author credentials:

"I have been writing software for 30 years. I worked at Google between 2006 and 2014, where I was a senior software engineer working on Maps, Gmail and account security. I spent the last five years at a US/UK firm where I designed the company’s database product, amongst other jobs and projects. I was also an independent consultant for a couple of years."

Unfortunately, the author (perhaps righteously) prefers to remain anonymous.

Citation:

"Conclusions. All papers based on this code should be retracted immediately. Imperial’s modelling efforts should be reset with a new team that isn’t under Professor Ferguson, and which has a commitment to replicable results with published code from day one.

On a personal level, I’d go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded. This sort of work is best done by the insurance sector. Insurers employ modellers and data scientists, but also employ managers whose job is to decide whether a model is accurate enough for real world usage and professional software engineers to ensure model software is properly tested, understandable and so on. Academic efforts don’t have these people, and the results speak for themselves."

Follow-up:

Second Analysis of Ferguson’s Model

In summary, the code is SO defective that it cannot reproduce its own results and produces different results when run on multi-processor systems.

"For standards to improve academics must lose the mentality that the rules don’t apply to them. In a formal petition to ICL to retract papers based on the model you can see comments “explaining” that scientists don’t need to unit test their code, that criticising them will just cause them to avoid peer review in future, and other entirely unacceptable positions. Eventually a modeller from the private sector gives them a reality check. In particular academics shouldn’t have to be convinced to open their code to scrutiny; it should be a mandatory part of grant funding."

Do tell. It is a travesty that truthsayers need to stay anonymous to protect themselves from punitive persecution for daring to come forward...

Note: "ICL" = Imperial College London.