COVID Model Coding "A Mess"

Timothy Birdnow

Since most science is funded by governments these days it is inherently corrupt; it's a matter of giving the boss what he wants or getting fired. Governments want power, control, and more money. This CV thing has given them all of that. It was a dream come true for every would be potentate and every aspiring pharoah. It's why the whole Climate Change thing dragged on for a generation with scant evidence. And it's especially true of this. The main difference between this and other such scams in the past is that the media was completely on board and the public accepted the premise because it theoretically had a direct, personal impact on them. When pop stars start doing psa's for this you know you are being suckered by a slick advertising campaign.

From the U.K. Telegraph:

The model, credited with forcing the Government to make a U-turn and introduce a nationwide lockdown, is a "buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming”, says David Richards, co-founder of British data technology company WANdisco.

"In our commercial reality, we would fire anyone for developing code like this and any business that relied on it to produce software for sale would likely go bust.”

[...]

"The Imperial model works by using code to simulate transport links, population size, social networks and healthcare provisions to predict how coronavirus would spread. However, questions have since emerged over whether the model is accurate, after researchers released the code behind it, which in its original form was "thousands of lines” developed over more than 13 years.

In its initial form, developers claimed the code had been unreadable, with some parts looking "like they were machine translated from Fortran”, an old coding language, according to John Carmack, an American developer, who helped clean up the code before it was published online. Yet, the problems appear to go much deeper than messy coding.

Many have claimed that it is almost impossible to reproduce the same results from the same data, using the same code. Scientists from the University of Edinburgh reported such an issue, saying they got different results when they used different machines, and even in some cases, when they used the same machines.

"There appears to be a bug in either the creation or re-use of the network file. If we attempt two completely identical runs, only varying in that the second should use the network file produced by the first, the results are quite different,” the Edinburgh researchers wrote on the Github file.

After a discussion with one of the Github developers, a fix was later provided. This is said to be one of a number of bugs discovered within the system. The Github developers explained this by saying that the model is "stochastic”, and that "multiple runs with different seeds should be undertaken to see average behaviour”.

However, it has prompted questions from specialists,who say "models must be capable of passing the basic scientific test of producing the same results given the same initial set of parameters...otherwise, there is simply no way of knowing whether they will be reliable.”

But this was government funded research, and the work did not require anything but the desired results. Panicky predictions are much more desirable to the government bosses than are dry statements of "well, it might be a nasty flu bug but..."

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 07:39 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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