An orbit-integrator energy-drift regression is known to lie somewhere among commits…
PHYSICS · Subjective · Fermi University Physics · Computational Physics · Research software practice, verification and validation · Research software practice, verification and validation
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Problem
An orbit-integrator energy-drift regression is known to lie somewhere among 850 commits between a last known-good commit (energy bounded over 100 orbits) and the current HEAD (energy drifting). A script runs the seeded energy-drift test on any given commit and exits zero if the energy stays bounded and non-zero if it drifts. Using bisection search along this ancestry path, how many test runs are needed in the worst case to isolate the single commit that introduced the regression? State the rule used.