How good are the Garvey-Kelson predictions of nuclear masses?

The Garvey-Kelson relations are used in an iterative process to predict nuclear masses in the neighborhood of nuclei with measured masses. Average errors in the predicted masses for the first three iteration shells are smaller than those obtained with the best nuclear mass models. Their quality is comparable with the Audi-Wapstra extrapolations, offering a simple and reproducible procedure for short range mass predictions. A systematic study of the way the error grows as a function of the iteration and the distance to the known masses region, shows that a correlation exists between the error and the residual neutron-proton interaction, produced mainly by the implicit assumption that V(np) varies smoothly along the nuclear landscape. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.