Active Reproducibility for File-Based Exploratory Science

Computational reproducibility is commonly understood as regenerating a file’s exact contents by re-executing the workflow that produced it. In exploratory science, however, workflows are rarely explicit: computation evolves through backtracking, parameter tuning, and abandoned execution paths, so the operations that produce a final result are often not represented in any single, coherent workflow description. As a result, irreproducibility is not merely a failure of documentation or user discipline, but a systems problem of recovering the correct workflow from unconstrained execution.