Monday, May 21, 2012

Testing hard algorithms

Programming is hard. Various techniques help simplify programming, but sometimes the only way to implement something is to think a lot while writing a thousand lines of lightly-tested code, then put the code through a diverse set of tests until you're not longer worried that it's going to fail in unexpected ways. I wrote a long, reflective essay on testing hard algorithms, using my recent MCS work to provide structure.

1 comment:

Tobias Kind said...

Hi Andrew,
thanks so much for the write-up.
Basically the daily life of a cheminformatics scientist :-)

I also agree on the curation part,
its a length process, mind numbing, and sometimes without merit, hopefully machines will do that for us in the future.

I like the whole MCS story including, fmcs - find the MCS of a set of compounds; Finding the MCSes for the ChEBI ontology; Topologically non-planar compounds; Testing hard algorithms

Cheers
Tobias