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pcwalton's profile
Patrick Walton
Patrick Walton
Patrick Walton
@pcwalton

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Patrick Walton

@pcwalton

Research engineer at Mozilla

San Francisco, CA
pcwalton.github.io
Joined November 2009

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    1. John Regehr‏ @johnregehr Apr 13
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      John Regehr Retweeted Ramsey Nasser

      gotta admit that while I've discovered a lot of wrong results in papers, it was always by reading the code or reimplementing the method, and never by reading the proofhttps://twitter.com/ra/status/1249711149790244866 …

      John Regehr added,

      Ramsey Nasser @ra
      im a bad computer scientist because every time i get to the part of the paper that has proofs i think "nah its good fam. i believe you. no need, its good, really. youre probably right, all good."
      10 replies 18 retweets 190 likes
      Show this thread
    2. John Regehr‏ @johnregehr Apr 13
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      of course I've seen a ton of incorrect or spurious proofs. it's just that these flaws have mostly been disconnected from flaws in the things being proved.

      1 reply 1 retweet 13 likes
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    3. John Regehr‏ @johnregehr Apr 13
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      not at all saying that proofs are useless, but I think in a lot of cases they're more useful to the authors than to the readers

      8 replies 1 retweet 31 likes
      Show this thread
    4. Sam Tobin-Hochstadt‏ @samth Apr 13
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      Replying to @johnregehr

      This is true, but they are included (I think) so that the reader can check whether the author did enough to be useful. Part of this is a limitation of "peer review only happens over the part in the 12 page pdf".

      2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
    5. Sam Tobin-Hochstadt‏ @samth Apr 13
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      Replying to @samth @johnregehr

      For a hotter take: the fact that we manage to mostly include our proofs in the reviewed PDF, but don't include our implementations, mean that our theoretical claims are mostly better-checked and more believable than our empirical ones.

      3 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
    6. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton Apr 13
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      Replying to @samth @johnregehr

      YEP. See: all the polygon triangulation papers I tried to implement that had impressive proofs but were useless in practice due to not considering floating point error.

      1 reply 2 retweets 9 likes
    7. Sam Tobin-Hochstadt‏ @samth Apr 13
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      Replying to @pcwalton @johnregehr

      Theoretically-nice but useless in practice is a real phenomenon, but not really the one I'm pointing out. Did the papers claim they had implementations that worked, but actually the implementations didn't work?

      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
      Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton Apr 13
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      Replying to @samth @johnregehr

      I forget, but I don’t think so, as the most famous result in polygon triangulation is an O(n log n) algorithm that is thought to never been successfully implemented by anyone

      9:11 AM - 13 Apr 2020
      • 6 Likes
      • danflapjax Nintendo .DS_Store Chris Peterson Mikhail Glushenkov Basit Ayantunde (@🏡) John Regehr
      1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        2. Patrick Walton‏ @pcwalton Apr 13
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          Replying to @pcwalton @samth @johnregehr

          (Not saying that unimplementable algorithms are useless, BTW—Babai’s graph isomorphism work is impressive because of the P?=NP implications—but I have a hard time getting excited about unimplementable polygon triangulation algorithms.)

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
        3. Sam Tobin-Hochstadt‏ @samth Apr 13
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          Replying to @pcwalton @johnregehr

          Right, I agree that unimplementable (or useless-in practice) algorithms are an issue. But there's also the issue of "we implemented this thing, here are the results" but actually the implementation is riddled with bugs that invalidate the results.

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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