In a message dated 4/21/03 3:07:20 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
pgilbert@bank-banque-canada.ca writes:

> There may be less work involved in doing (un-official) validation than there 
> is
> in advertising how much is actually being done. Perhaps the simplest 
> approach is
> for individuals to put together packages of tests with descriptions that 
> explain
> the extent of the testing which is done, and then submit the packages to 
> CRAN.
> 

Another suggestion to address the issue of validation in the long-term:

1) "Validation" of scientific research takes the form of peer-review, perhaps 
it is possible to come-up with a similar (not same) process for publishing 
software, while maintaining the openness.
2)  We can also think of contribution to open source software as academic 
contribution---it definitely furthers scientific inquiry by providing basic 
tools for it, quite broadly and across many disciplines.  So it may be 
possible to think about a framework that provides academic/research credit, 
like peer-reviewed publications, for *publishing* software, may be even using 
peer-review in a way that allows continuous review, continuous feedback, 
continuous improvement.  Perhaps R community can take a lead in coming up 
with the framework, or the issues that need to be addressed.
3) Meets Popperian criteria for science (even Lakatos' ): a result (esp 
difficult numerical optimization) is falsifiable, and may be falsified when a 
bug is found or a better procedure is implemented.
---Anupam.

	[[alternate HTML version deleted]]

