🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan5.170446.15655@Princeton.EDU> awolfe@moo.Princeton.EDU (Andrew Wolfe) writes:
>...
>
>(Philosophical note.  This experiment also raised the issue of whether or
>not the architecture community will accept the publication of negative
>results.  We could not locate any recent papers in major conferences that
>did not have positive results)
>
>Andrew Wolfe
>...
>Princeton University

The publication of failures is nearly as important as the publication of 
successes.  The problem is finding a place to air these.  If the major 
conferences have an adequate supply of success story papers, then they aren't
apt to want to run interesting failures.  Trouble is, the failures are usually
MUCH more interesting than the triumphs and probably include "real world" 
factors that are often left out of theoretical successes.
 
Publishing failed attempts would help to keep others from 
duplicating the exact mistakes, and prompt the rest of us to conjure up
scenarios of "if they only did it THIS way, then ...", and we could all feel so superior that we would NEVER have made those silly mistakes ;)  

My bookshelf has many ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News publications.
They all have papers published in them, and 
most of them have so few articles it makes me wonder why I subscribe to it.  I
would lay odds that that publication would relish a whole host of "failure 
stories", if for no other reason than to justify its existence and make it
more interesting to read.
 
The challenge, then, is to see if researchers are willing to risk embarrassment
and competition on a subsequent retry, by telling the world why a certain
experiment didn't turn out so well.

Roger E. Tipley
Compaq Computer Corporation
tipley@twisto.compaq.com