[lowbloodsugar]

If I've learned anything in my career it is that no, ideas are not valuable. There are vastly more bad ideas than good ideas. What makes an idea valuable is validation. Papers aren't to present ideas: papers are to present ideas that have been validated. We proposed an idea, we went and ran some experiments or gathered data some other way, and we concluded the idea was valid (or not valid). The point of this discussion here is that ideas that require huge amounts of computer effort to validate are prone to bugs. The conclusions cannot be relied upon to be validated without having the software available so that it, too, can be validated.

[chrisseaton]

But there are so many valuable papers in CS that just presented an idea. If you ignored them you’d be ignorant of how to do 90% of modern engineering.

Likely the tech stack you use is built on a tower of ‘just idea’ papers.

[lowbloodsugar]

Really? I've read a lot of SIGGraph papers, and sure, they didn't provide all the code. But you know that the code exists. And certainly for those there's a lot of trust. I think we're talking here about something different. Not "hey, you can use quaternions for animation" but "If you factor in hippopotamus usage, young adults experience 22% more flange per square doughnut, and we got all this data, and we ran it through 25 separate computer programs written in lolcode, and look, proof!"

[unionpivo]

> But there are so many valuable papers in CS that just presented an idea. If you ignored them you’d be ignorant of how to do 90% of modern engineering.

You are right. But that is why we are having this discussions, so we can improve situation.

Having even bad code (and corresponding data) available is always better than not. You can always just ignore it, and read the papers like today.

Honestly I am ok with just zip file of project directory that you have anyway, with hopefully list of versions of os, libs and programs used.

We could do a lot better than just a zip file, but that would be a nice start.