Reply To: NIMBY FUD

[ikanreed]

Warwick wrote:

How do you validate the simulation?

It’s nice to know that we’re working on simulating plasmas better, but how can you validate that the simulation was programmed correctly? As a software developer myself, I know that every piece of code has at least a few bugs. Is there some kind of well known test-case to compare against?

The code for the next iteration will be open source so there will be some scope for interested people to try and spot mistakes for themselves.

That’s nice and all, but that doesn’t tell you if the simulation has any bearing on the real world, only helps determine if the code matches the design. Open source is not a magic bullet. But if the code gets released, I’ll check it over for things a scientific layman can fix.