Monday, January 10, 2011

Algorithms take control of Wall Street

Algorithms take control of Wall Street appeared in this month's Wired. Artificial Intelligences at investment banks are making a huge percentage of the trades on Wall Street.

"But these are not ways of controlling the algorithms—they are ways of slowing them down or stopping them for a few minutes. That's a tacit admission that the system has outgrown the humans that created it. Today a single stock can receive 10,000 bids per second; that deluge of data overwhelms any attempt to create a simple cause-and-effect narrative. "Our financial markets have become a largely automated adaptive dynamical system, with feedback," says Michael Kearns, a computer science professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has built algorithms for various Wall Street firms. "There's no science I'm aware of that's up to the task of understanding its potential implications.""

This just seems like a really bad idea.

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