Critiqued coronavirus simulation gets thumbs up from code-checking efforts

Critiqued coronavirus simulation gets thumbs up from code-checking efforts

Code-checkers give critiqued model a thumbs up

“Horrible.” “Totally unreliable.” “A buggy mess.” Over the past month, software engineers have sharply criticized the code underpinning an influential coronavirus simulation by scientists at Imperial College London, one of several models that helped sway UK politicians into declaring a lockdown. Now, a computational neuroscientist has reported that he has independently rerun the simulation and reproduced its results. And other scientists have told Nature that they had already privately verified that the code is reproducible.

Nature | 5 min read