Jim Graham on Reproducibility

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

In response to Titus Brown's not-really-joking spoof of how most scientists manage their data, Scimatic's Jim Graham has asked, "What is reproducibility, anyway?" His main point is that if I re-run your code on your data, and get the same result that you got, I haven't actually added to the sum total of human knowledge. If I get an equivalent answer using different code, on the other hand, then our confidence in the answer is usefully increased. What do you think?