This is a problem in computational electrophysiology as well. There are a lot of typos and other simple mistakes in classic papers. Say you want to implement a finite differences model for a certain type of voltage-gated potassium channel. If you go back to the original paper it's not uncommon to find minus-signs omitted, parentheses placed improperly or other unfortunate bugs. It can take a lot of head scratching and wasted time to get to the point that you can reproduce the figures from the paper!
Granted when something has been in the literature for a long time, the derivative papers and popular implementations (in eg Neuron) are usually right, but there is rarely anything in the scholarly record that documents these errors. It's all tribal-knowldege and side-channels.
Ugh, that sounds terrible. During a previous internship at a HPC company[0] I implemented a computational electrodynamics FDTD algorithm as given in the Taflove book[1], and I made more than enough errors even without the book containing mistakes! Two fields, each with three components and subtly different equations for all. What a nightmare. Especially since it's impossible to tell what is wrong when watching the EM wave propagate in an impossible oblong fashion during your simulation.
Granted when something has been in the literature for a long time, the derivative papers and popular implementations (in eg Neuron) are usually right, but there is rarely anything in the scholarly record that documents these errors. It's all tribal-knowldege and side-channels.