Saturday, February 21, 2004
BBC NEWS | Technology | Video game to help flood planners
Laudable - play games and stop people's homes flooding sometime in the future. The convergence of education and gaming is here. But forgive my cynicism, as I have previously worked with the government's own organisation who developed the models for flooding. We were working on the next generation user interface to the system, and kept getting some strange results. On checing back though the code, we couldn't find that we'd done anythnig wrong, so checked the engine that they'd written, and which was in widespread planning use. Ah - problems with imperial to metric conversion, and a few fudge factors - yes, in places the predicted values were three or more times less than they should have been. We corrected this in the newer versions, but I'm not sure they ever informed their other users. So when I see a quite recent housing estate flooded, and people standing around saying it shouldn't have happened, I am not as suprised as some.
Computers may be magical devices, but if they are programmed incorrectly then they still spew out rubbish...
Laudable - play games and stop people's homes flooding sometime in the future. The convergence of education and gaming is here. But forgive my cynicism, as I have previously worked with the government's own organisation who developed the models for flooding. We were working on the next generation user interface to the system, and kept getting some strange results. On checing back though the code, we couldn't find that we'd done anythnig wrong, so checked the engine that they'd written, and which was in widespread planning use. Ah - problems with imperial to metric conversion, and a few fudge factors - yes, in places the predicted values were three or more times less than they should have been. We corrected this in the newer versions, but I'm not sure they ever informed their other users. So when I see a quite recent housing estate flooded, and people standing around saying it shouldn't have happened, I am not as suprised as some.
Computers may be magical devices, but if they are programmed incorrectly then they still spew out rubbish...
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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