Code Review of Ferguson’s Model

Some mind-boggling quotes from the article:

"Investigation reveals ... the code produces critically different results, even for identical starting seeds and parameters."

"In issue 116 a UK “red team” at Edinburgh University reports that they tried to use a mode that stores data tables in a more efficient format for faster loading, and discovered – to their surprise – that the resulting predictions varied by around 80,000 deaths after 80 days"

"In issue #30, someone reports that the model produces different outputs depending on what kind of computer it’s run on (regardless of the number of CPUs). Again, the explanation is that although this new problem “will just add to the issues” … “This isn’t a problem running the model in full as it is stochastic anyway”."

"Much of the code consists of formulas for which no purpose is given. John Carmack (a legendary video-game programmer) surmised that some of the code might have been automatically translated from FORTRAN some years ago."

"Despite being aware of the severe problems in their code that they “haven’t had time” to fix, the Imperial team continue to add new features; for instance, the model attempts to simulate the impact of digital contact tracing apps."

How is this not at the top of HN? This is hilarious. "Just average all the runs and call it stochastic, nobody will notice that we can't reproduce the results"!

Names article "code review".

No actual code review is done. Out of 2 screens of text, 1 link to actual code line.