Practice question · Multiple choice
A program runs without errors and produces plausible numbers that are wrong. Why is this harder to catch than a crash?
Hints
- Ask what tells you something has gone wrong in each case.
- What would you check a simulation against?
Show the answer
C. Because nothing signals the failure; a crash announces itself
Why
Silence is the danger. Validating against analytical solutions, limiting cases and conserved quantities is how scientific code is made trustworthy, the absence of a crash proves nothing.
Practise Debugging and validation
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