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Influential model judged reproducible — although software engineers called its code ‘horrible’ and ‘a buggy mess’.
“Totally unreliable.” “A buggy mess.” Over the past month, software engineers have sharply criticized the code underpinning an influential coronavirus simulation by scientists at Imperial College London, one of several modelling exercises that helped sway UK politicians into declaring a lockdown. Some media articles even suggested that the simulation couldn’t be repeated by others — casting further doubt on the study. Now, a computational neuroscientist has reported that he has independently rerun the simulation and reproduced its results. And other scientists have told Nature that they had already privately verified that the code is reproducible.
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Nature 582, 323-324 (2020)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01685-y
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