MC-TESTER is a universal tool for comparisons of Monte Carlo predictions in High-Energy physics.
It makes extensive use of ROOT facilities (i.e. histograms, files and CINT).
It’s main area of use is semi-automatic comparisons of two (or more) Monte Carlo event generators. It requires minimal intervention to user’s work environment and has complete FORTRAN77 support (although the project is written in C++ entirely).
The project is available from it webpage:
[url]http://piters.home.cern.ch/piters/MC/MC-TESTER/[/url]
Full documentation is also available at the webpage and as CERN preprint CERN-TH/2002-271, (also LANL, and LC preprints)
As an example of use (the example included with MC-TESTER distribution), two versions of TAUOLA Monte Carlo generators are compared - the two versions have slightly different code and initializations that comes from ALEPH and CLEO collaborations. As a result of MC-TESTER run, a summary “booklet” is created - it contains a list of all decay modes of “tau” lepton and a set of histograms of all possible invariant masses in every decay channel for both versions of the code. A “visual check” of the histogram pictures discovers possible differences in the two versions of the code. Some guidance is also provided: for each picture (containing histograms generated by two generators), a “Shape Difference Parameter” is calculated. It’s value quantifies statistical difference between the distribution.