On 21 February 2016 at 22:33, zkaufman@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu wrote:
Intolerable differences have not been found. They are always minor <%5 and their source can come from several places. For example, different compilers (or even different versions of the same compiler) can have different sorting behavior when presented with objects that have equivalent comparators. Others occur with data structures being written/read to disk (Im still trying to fully understand those). As well as a host of other potential differences as you mention below.
However, no cases have been found to fall outside expected and accepted tolerance levels.
That's a relief, but it makes me wonder about another point (and please understand that I'm making the following statement from a position of ignorance as to how Freesurfer is used in practice):
Shouldn't differences like this be embraced? They are giving a measure of the error bars which should be applied to any results.
I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts about this.
Going back to smaller and concrete things, I'm also curious as to the differences you say are creeping in when IO occurs. Is this happening for formatted or binary I/O?
Thanks,
Richard