AI news
MarketWatch Columnist Warns Of Trading Robots Reaching "The Singularity"
And the award for the most ridiculous, most paranoid-sounding column about the dangers of High-Frequency Trading goes to Paul B. Farell of Marketwatch, who warns that trading robots have achieved "The Singularity" and absolutely cannot be beaten by retail investors
Last year Wall Street banks were virtually insolvent. Taxpayers stimulated them back from the dead. Now, thanks to the proliferation of HFT-Quants, Wall Street's again racing at hyperspeed, gambling with the money it conned from taxpayers, using it to skim more from clueless investors. First the Fed and Treasury, now Wall Street's "Too-Stupid-To-Fail" banks are stealing from Main Street's "Too-Dumb-To-Stop-Trading" investors.
Wall Street's greed machine never stops, never. So who are these new predators prowling the markets? How do they win so big? And where is their "Singularity?"
Our imagery begins with Ray Kurzweil. Inventor. Entrepreneur. Futurist. An artificial-Intelligence visionary who thinks at hyperspeed, like the HFT-Quants. Kurzweil predicted this new reality in his best-sellers: "The Singularity is Near" and "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence."
Just a few years ago Kurzweil's "Near" wasn't until 2045, when the human race "breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress and longevity." That was his law of "accelerating returns" where intellectual progress rockets into the future exponentially faster than Moore's Law.
What's too bad, is that if you take out the self-righteousness ("money it conned from taxpayers!") and the paranoia ("breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy") the column actually makes a good point, which is that most of the time, daytrading is a fool's game that shouldn't be tried at home.
Of course, that's always been the case. Amateur, at-home investors have always traded badly, and nothing about the HFT makes this new. If anything, these machines are a net-positive if they reinforce the idea that there will never be an even playing field. But nobody wants to hear that, and it doesn't make for a good rant.
Perhaps there's money to be made in Robot Insurance?
AIIDE-09 Conference Announces Invited Speakers
Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE) organizers have announced the list of invited speakers for this year’s event. Invitees will share their insights into the field’s recent developments and future directions. The line-up includes luminaries of game design, development, and entertainment research:
- Michael Booth (Valve)
- Richard Evans (Maxis / Electronic Arts)
- David Hernández Cerpa (LucasArts)
- Michael Mateas (UC Santa Cruz)
- Paul Tozour
“This year's AIIDE academic and industry talk lineup is very exciting,” said Michael Youngblood, AIIDE-09 program chair and a research professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “The invited talks are going to present the cutting edge in AI technology behind recently released games and also further the discussion of how the increased demands on AI in entertainment need to be met. The technical submissions are also very strong and will present ideas that we will see in future interactive entertainment. We are all looking forward to the community coming together again and sharing their ideas, work, and passion.”AIIDE-09 is the fifth annual conference on game AI and interactive entertainment. Conference program includes invited speakers, research and industry presentations, and a lively poster/demonstration session. AIIDE is hosted by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
The conference will take place on October 14-16, 2009, on the campus of Stanford University, CA, USA, in the heart of Silicon Valley. Conference program and more information can be found at www.aiide.org.
AI investing could be in your future
Legend Advisory Corp., subsidiary of Waddell & Reed, has been using artificial intelligence to invest mutual funds into various assets. Legend has applied this practice when managing retirement plans, endowments, foundations, institutions and individual assets. "We’re doing some phenomenal stuff," said Jim Leos, of the Legend Group and Legend’s regional vice president for Arizona. "We wanted to figure out what was the most proactive and scientific way to manage money that takes out the human emotions greed and fear. We’ve done that."
Artificial Intelligence System - 100 Billion Neurons and Beyond
Toronto, Ontario, Jul. 25, 2008 - Intelligence Realm Inc. has recently completed a simulation of 100 billion neurons, the estimated size of the human brain. The simulation used distributed computing and involved over 4000 computers, 3000 volunteers, 10000 processors, 180 TB of data and lasted for a couple of months. This was the first simulation that bypassed the 100 billion level and used database files to store the data. The simulation is one of the first steps in a long-term project that is aiming to build a large-scale artificial intelligence by reverse engineering the brain.
Addaptron Software Releases Neural Network Stock Predictor
Neural networks can discover patterns in data and successfully predict the future trend. A small Canadian company, Addaptron Software - the developer of decision support tools for stock investors and traders - has developed NNSTP-2, neural network computer tool, to help stock traders in predicting stock prices within 1-60 days. NNSTP-2 predicts future share prices using Fuzzy Neural Network (FNN). It operates automatically when creating the FNN, training it, and mapping to classify a new input vector. The input data transformed to characteristic matrices before training FNN. The forecasting is based on automatic scan of different inputs periods (historical price and volume data) to define accuracy of each one by back testing. Then the final forecast is built on weighted averaging of all forecasts. Each weight is proportional to the accuracy of a certain input period forecast.