Too busy

Sorry for the delay in blips... this week has been too busy! I have been trying to make sure that the complicated model I have spent weeks making is actually correct. I thought this would be easy - does it look right, and does the code run? If yes, then it's correct! Unfortunately it's quite a bit harder than that. I have three models - a very simple one, a medium complexity one, and a very complex one (which is what I will be using to produce results). What I have to do in order to see whether my most complex model works is to run all three models and make sure they match under the same parameter values - as, although they have different complexities, they should be able to give me the same results overall. 

So I thought that I would run all three, they would all work, and that would be it! However, I found an incredible amount of errors across all three models, which took half a week to fix. This led to my easy and medium complexity models matching, but my most complex model still being slightly different. So I have spent the last three days trying to figure out why.... I FINALLY got the solution today after giving up and asking the entire lab. Thankfully they were all happy to help and, after about an hour, we managed to fix it - the issue was that there was a problem with one of the biological assumptions rather than the actual coding (which was correct) so it took a lot of systems knowledge to know what to look for. 

THANKFULLY that is over now. I have left my computer in the lab running overnight to run all three models 1000 times (to get the means and compare output values statistically) and I should be able to sort that quickly tomorrow morning. Then my mum and sister are here for the rest of the weekend so I'll get to have lots of fun with them :) 

I'll update my missing two blips soon, but now it's time for bed!