Strilanc comments on The dangers of zero and one - Less Wrong

27 Post author: PhilGoetz 21 November 2013 12:21PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (68)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Strilanc 16 January 2014 01:21:44AM 0 points [-]

My experience with coding is that stupid obvious mistakes are way more likely than 1/10000. You write something slightly wrong, keep reading it as if it were right, and that's that.

Determining if a number is prime is a bit of a nice case, I suppose, because it's so amenable to testing. The structure of the mistakes you make is unlikely to match the structure of primes, so you'll catch any mistakes more easily.

I'd still consider doing it 10000 times to be extremely difficult. Just adding 10000 six-digit numbers by hand, even with some cross-checking, is quite difficult.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 16 January 2014 02:47:42AM *  0 points [-]

Yes, stupid coding mistakes are more like 1 in 2 than 1 in 10^4; it is the testing that helps here.