Sanity check

A sanity check or sanity test is a basic test to quickly evaluate whether a claim or the result of a calculation can possibly be true. It is a simple check to see if the produced material is rational (that the material's creator was thinking rationally, applying sanity). The point of a sanity test is to rule out certain classes of obviously false results, not to catch every possible error. A rule-of-thumb or back-of-the-envelope calculation may be checked to perform the test. The advantage of performing an initial sanity test is that of speedily evaluating basic function. In arithmetic, for example, when multiplying by 9, using the divisibility rule for 9 to verify that the sum of digits of the result is divisible by 9 is a sanity test—it will not catch every multiplication error, however it's a quick and simple method to discover many possible errors. In computer science, a sanity test is a very brief run-through of the functionality of a computer program, system, calculation, or other analysis, to assure that part of the system or methodology works roughly as expected. This is often prior to a more exhaustive round of testing. A sanity test can refer to various orders of magnitude and other simple rule-of-thumb devices applied to cross-check mathematical calculations. For example: If one were to attempt to square 738 and calculated 54,464, a quick sanity check could show that this result cannot be true. Consider that yet Since squaring positive integers preserves their inequality, the result cannot be true, and so the calculated result is incorrect. The correct answer, is more than 10 times higher than 54,464. In multiplication, is not 142,135 since 918 is divisible by three but 142,135 is not (digits add up to 16, not a multiple of three). Also, the product must end in the same digit as the product of end-digits: but 142,135 does not end in "0" like "40", while the correct answer does: An even quicker check is that the product of even and odd numbers is even, whereas 142,135 is odd.