Applying mathematical software documentation: an experience report
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Those who do not use "formal methods" for developing software (and they remain the overwhelming majority of software developers) often claim that mathematical software development can only be used by highly educated people, and on especially well-written programs. We counter this claim by reporting on some recent experience. An undergraduate engineering student who had no previous exposure to mathematical software documentation techniques was asked to use a new method to document a program that had been written for photonics and microwave development, but did not always work as required; the author had departed and the program's owners were not able to find the problem. The student was not asked to change the program, just to provide precise documentation. However, the process of documentation revealed several errors and, after they were corrected, the program was left in working, and maintainable condition. Our experience supports the position of those who believe that mathematical methods can be used by typical engineers with immediate benefits.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it