Dear Kamil,
Let me apologize publicly if you feel
personally insulted. If I was warning you away from doing something I
thought might be ill-advised, it’s only because I’d done it myself
in the past, and regretted it! The purpose of this list is to enjoy the
benefits of our collected experience. I’d like to think that if I
wrote to this list and asked about the R/S syntax for fitting data to a series
of exponentials with unknown decay rates, that at least a few of my colleagues
on here would ask, “Are you sure you want to try that?”
As Acton
points out, there are lots of good reasons to let a computer bang away at a
large system of equations. (He mentions X-ray crystallography as another field
where this approach is—or at least was—commonplace.)
Alan