THE RECOMPUTATION MANIFESTO

2. Recomputation of recomputable experiments should be very easy 3. Tools and repositories can help recomputation become standard 4. It should be easier to make experiments recomputable than not to 5. The only way to ensure recomputability is to provide virtual machines 6. Runtime performance is a secondary issue Replication of scientific experiments is critical to the advance of science.1 Unfortunately, the discipline of Computer Science has never treated replication seriously, even though com-puters are very good at doing the same thing over and over again. Not only are experiments rarely replicated, they are rarely even replicable in a meaningful way. Scientists are being encouraged to make their source code available [13], but this is only a small step. Even in the happy event that source code can be built and run successfully, running code is a long way away from being able to replicate the experiment that code was used for. I propose that the discipline of Computer Science must embrace replication of experiments as standard practice. I propose that the only credible technique to make experiments truly replicable is to provide copies of virtual machines in which the experiments are validated t