Hazy Computing

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on Oct 16, 2008 5:25 AM EDT
Linux Magazine; By Douglas Eadline, Ph.D
Mail this story
Print this story

Recently, there was an interesting article in the New York Times. The article brought up some fascinating issues about our reliance on computers — particularly in the world of finance. I touched on this briefly before and I think the article raises some good points. Basically, the “Wall Street geeks” or “quants” (quantitative analysts) develop sophisticated algorithms (evolutionary or Genetic Algorithms, GA’s) that package up securities with all the right attributes to make them attractive to other buyers. The interesting thing is that these types of algorithms produce results (in a sense “optimizations”) that people don’t really understand. In the past, I recall reading about an antenna designed using a GA. The result worked great, the design however was weird and in a sense ugly.

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Story Type: News Story

« Return to the newswire homepage

This topic does not have any threads posted yet!

You cannot post until you login.