On Dec 6, 8:01 am, David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net> wrote:
> This presupposes that people of fairly high mathematical knowledge are
> good at writing software.
>
> I'm yet to be convinced that having a PhD in maths, or studying for
> one, makes you good at writing software tests
I quite agree. Or even writing software in the first place.
Unless those people
> have studied the different sort of testing techniques available -
> white box, black box, fuzz etc, then I fail to see how they can be in
> a good position to write the tests.
That would not be my criterion (studying that stuff). I've taught
courses
in software engineering and much of what is conveyed has almost no
applicability for scientific software testing.
>
> Vladimir Bondarenko.has been very effective at finding bugs in
> commercial maths software by use of various testing techniques, yet I
> think I'm correct in saying Vladimir does not have a maths degree of
> any soft.
If you believe that those are independent, pragmatically plausible
bugs, and not just presenting gibberish and looking to see what comes
out.
VB's problems are in having a degree or not.
>
> I'm still waiting to hear from Wolfram Research on the use of Wolfram
> Alpha for this.
Why would they bother to reply?
> Personally I don't think there's anything in the terms
> of use of Wolfram Alpha stopping use of the software for this, but
> someone (I forget who), did question whether it is within the terms of
> use or not.
Hey, this is a silly idea even if they deign to respond and say it is
OK.
You can just run Mathematica.
>
> > But consistency comparisons using all open source software when
> > possible are very useful indeed, since they are more maintainable
> > longterm.
>
> Yes.
really doubtful. Comparing 2 results that are equivalent but not
identical
(simplified differently) is difficult sometimes. Using someone's open
source software is potentially a big waste of time. You have to
debug that too! Your statement is kind of ambiguous... do you mean
"all open source software" or "only open source software"? or
maybe "selected open source software" or ... excluding closed
source...
Whether open source is "more maintainable"
is also naive. If someone (else) maintains the open source, and it
changes,
what then? If the open source no longer runs, and you have to
"maintain" it,
what then? Compare this to "does Mathematica [say] give an answer
that
is consistent? " {still problematical, but at least you don't have
to "maintain" it.}
>
> Especially if Wolfram Research thought it would hurt their revenue
> from Mathematica sales, they could very easy re-write the terms of use
> to disallow the use of Wolfram Alpha to check other software.
1. This is silly for reasons given above.
2. Why would they waste their (lawyer's) time.
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