Being open source is definitely a plus for SymPy here. The authors could have stepped through SymPy with a debugger to help figure out their problem, and submitted a pull request for a fix once they found it.
It's not always possible, or obvious, but it's best to verify your results somehow. A good way is to compute the same thing, but in a different way (doing a random numerical check counts as this). The likelihood of a bug manifesting itself in exactly the same way in two completely different algorithms is very low. But you are right that all software has bugs. I would consider this paper to be rather low quality, especially for the ACM. It reads more like a ranty comment from an idiot on Hacker News than an academic paper. Even so, others reading it may have the same mindset that they did, that black box software written by others always works, and it's good to remove that illusion. Aaron Meurer On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 6:38 AM, Joachim Durchholz <[email protected]> wrote: > http://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf > > It's hammering Mathematica, but of course bugs like that can happen with any > symbolic math software. > Still, SymPy might be able to milk arguments from it. Such as: being open > source, it's easier to find and fix the source of miscalculations like the > one reported in that paper. > > (I find it also remarkable that Wolfram let a known problem lie dormant for > so long. That paper is going to hurt their name, badly.) > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "sympy" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/544F9C5F.7080800%40durchholz.org. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sympy/CAKgW%3D6%2BXOCC0OvsxS-LgHoJi3661m_-HSFTAcCB2PGrVXcYXaA%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
