From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!aioe.org!.POSTED.5toSSCP5H8WhQPVIfFrwuA.user.gioia.aioe.org!not-for-mail From: "Dmitry A. Kazakov" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Not to incite a language war but apparently the Corona lockdown was based on 13 year old undocumented C-Code Date: Tue, 12 May 2020 22:53:17 +0200 Organization: Aioe.org NNTP Server Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: 5toSSCP5H8WhQPVIfFrwuA.user.gioia.aioe.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.8.0 X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.9.2 Content-Language: en-US Xref: reader01.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:58662 Date: 2020-05-12T22:53:17+02:00 List-Id: On 2020-05-12 22:11, Niklas Holsti wrote: > The blog's complaints about non-determinism and statistics are mistaken. Similar to common misunderstanding of the nature of floating-point computations. One could have non-deterministic floating-point unit which would still be usable and correct. Musings about determinism/non-determinism is rubbish. > The simulation is intentionally stochastic and is meant to be executed > multiple times to give an ensemble of scenarios. I did not read the blog etc, but methodologically the approach, as I understand it from your description, is questionable. In order to get a statistically relevant sample of simulations one should run lots of them and likely have access to high quality random numbers to avoid running into some systematic trends. > What catastrophe? It seems some bugs were found in the program, which > possibly had minor effects on the predictions -- probably much smaller > effects than the inevitable errors in the input parameters and > assumptions. The horrific predictions from the program pushed > governments to take strong actions to stop the spread of the virus, and > these seem to have worked in the most affected places like New York state. > > Popular and professional scientific journals and magazines have been > warning for years and decades about future flu-like pandemics which > could markedly reduce (or "normalize") the planet's population of Homo > Sapiens. Could be theological journals as well. There is little scientific in such predictions in either direction of the outcome. > Suppose, for example, that HIV had been as infective as the > common flu... Then it would adapt to the host as quickly as the common flu did. The pace of adaptation directly depends on the number of replications which is proportional to the contagiousness. -- Regards, Dmitry A. Kazakov http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de