#jiscxyz
Amusement (hopefully). You don’t have to understand theoretical chemistry to take part.
The following ASCII text represents the output of a theoretical chemistry program. It contains an error. This error was not created by the program (and I have removed its name (XXXXXXXXXXX) so as not to throw any aspersions on it). The error is typical of a general problem in scientific information.
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N-N= 1.312300318470D+03 E-N=-4.587475340442D+03 KE= 8.364019136890D+02
AllDun Frequency-dependent properties on file 20721 Mask= 2 NFrqRd= 1 NDeriv= 1 LenFil= 12:
Frequencies= 0.077357
Property number 2 — FD Optical Rotation Tensor frequency 1 0.077357:
1 2 3
1 -0.139106D+02 0.342269D+02 0.258275D+01
2 0.381206D+02 0.255976D+02 0.312180D+02
3 0.157839D+02 0.161937D+03 -0.135731D+02
Job cpu time: 0 days 1 hours 53 minutes 7.4 seconds.
File lengths (MBytes): RWF= 419 Int= 0 D2E= 0 Chk= 6 Scr= 1
Normal termination of XXXXXXXXXXX at Fri Oct 03 15:18:55 2010.
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The error can be detected by computer more easily than by humans.
Please indicate:
- The error
- How you think the error might have arisen in practice
- Whether there might be other undetected errors in the document
UPDATE:
Two people have found the error. Well done. They have not hypothesised how it might have occurred. This requires a flash of inspiration and/or common exposure to this very common problem.
UPDATE:
The error is in:
Normal termination of XXXXXXXXXXX at Fri Oct 03 15:18:55 2010.
This is an impossible date (in any current Chronology). So how could it have happened? And I promise you that this type of problem occurs zillions of times every day. And no, it’s not human mistyping (though that destroys and corrupts science very effectively).
UPDATE: The date was actually Fri Oct 08 15:18:55 2010 . Does that give any clues as to what could have happened?