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- From: edp@math.zko.dec.com (Eric Postpischil)
- Subject: Re: Scientists as Programmers (was Re: Small Language Wanted)
- Message-ID: <1992Sep1.173636.6387@nntpd.lkg.dec.com>
- Sender: usenet@nntpd.lkg.dec.com (USENET News System)
- Reply-To: edp@math.zko.dec.com (Eric Postpischil)
- Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
- References: <1992Aug25.154501.8654@colorado.edu> <1992Aug26.192410.6523@ultb.isc.rit.edu> <1992Aug27.154823.583@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca> <BtpAIn.EE5@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> <34742@cbmvax.commodore.com> <1992Aug31.133811.3626@crd.ge.com> <1992Aug31.135937.5801@dcc.uchile.cl>
- Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1992 17:36:36 GMT
- Lines: 65
-
- In article <1992Aug31.135937.5801@dcc.uchile.cl>, pchris@dcc.uchile.cl
- (Chris Perleberg) writes:
-
- >I worked for two summers in a physics research center (Mission Reseach Corp)
- >in Santa Barbara, Calif. All the people working there were PhDs in Physics
- >and they all wrote nuclear codes in FORTRAN. They found CS programmers to
- >be useless: "....it's easier to teach a PhD en Physics how to program then
- >to teach a CS programmer Physics...." There is a hell of a lot of truth in
- >that statement. Most PhD's in Physics are reasonably intelligent and
- >programming is not really a difficult challenge. And scientific code
- >often naturally structures itself.
-
- On the other hand, I (a senior software engineer) have seen code written
- by scientists. While it manages to work, there are serious oversights
- like forgetting to initialize variables, numerical instabilities, et
- cetera. I can be sure the code works on some data, but it has never
- been properly tested by a good software engineer.
-
- To say programming is not really a difficult challenge is to be unaware
- of many of the pitfalls of computing, both numeric and algorithmic. On
- the numeric side, a physicist might be unaware of the proper order in
- which to arrange arithmetic operations to preserve accuracy. On the
- algorithmic side, a physicist might be unaware of the issues of
- computational complexity that would let them speed up a program or make
- an infeasible program feasible or the issues of what problems are even
- computable (recursively enumerable sets, et cetera).
-
- The person who is really needed to write scientific applications is
- neither your average scientist nor your average software engineer, but
- somebody who knows both. Hire me. I majored in computer science,
- graduated magna cum laude from Rochester Institute of Technology, and
- have eight years of experience in operating systems development, yet my
- physics teacher in an electricity and magnetism class remarked that I
- was outperforming the physics majors, and my strongest skills are in
- mathematics, in which I used all my electives and am now taking graduate
- classes. I'd love to have a job mixing programming and mathematics. I
- took the GREs last year and scored 790 verbal, 800 quantitative, and 800
- analytic. Don't know whether to hire a mathematician, physicist,
- computer scientist, or programmer to do your computer work? Call me.
-
- As it happens, I am currently investigating homometric rulers that
- measure distinct distances; these are part of a class of problems with
- applications in crystallography, coherence theory, signal processing,
- antenna array design, wavefront estimation in speckle imaging, electron
- microscopy, inverse scattery, and image recovery from speckle
- interferometry data in astronmy. The problem I am examining is this:
- Given a ruler with m marks at various location which can measure the
- m*(m-1)/2 distances between each pair of marks, is there another ruler
- that measures the same distances but is not produced by reflection or
- translation of the first? It is known there are no such rulers for 5 or
- fewer marks, but there is one family of such ruler pairs with 6 marks.
- Bloom and Golomb have conducted numeric searches for pairs with 7, 8,
- and 9 marks with lengths up to 33, 43, and 49, respectively. But a
- colleague and I, both software engineers, have used non-numeric
- algorithms to search for symbolic solutions, and have proven there are
- no such rulers with 7, 8, 9, or 10 marks of ANY length. (Strictly, the
- algorithms we use are numeric, in the coefficients of the algebraic
- expressions we manipulate, but no numbers for the mark locations appear
- in the program at any time; they are always symbolic.) The numeric
- programs could have been speed up a trillion times and they never would
- have produced our results.
-
- -- edp (Eric Postpischil)
- "Always mount a scratch monkey."
- edp@alien.enet.dec.com
-