Deep Blue Gene: Ten years of exponential growth
This article reminded me that ten years ago yesterday, Deep Blue beat Kasparov to become the first computer to win a match against the world chess champion. It could process 200 million chess moves per second. Today, the fastest supercomputer in the world (and the World’s Most Energy Efficient Computer), IBM’s Blue Gene, “uses 131,000 processors to routinely handle 280 trillion operations every second.”
A single scientist with a calculator would have to work non-stop for 177,000 years to perform the operations that Blue Gene can do in one second.
Supercomputers aren’t going to get any slower. Actually it seems like they will continue to speed up exponentially – that’s the trend anyway, why would it stop now? This means that in the next ten years, the growth will be even greater than the last ten.
Think about what’s happened in the last ten years. Not many people even had cell phones in 1997. The internet was just being born. Think how much just ten years has changed Wall Street. There’s no way I could trade like I do now ten years ago.
What will the next ten years do to trading and the stock market?
This article talks about a possibility that I think is most likely (via tradereyal):
This is going to change the world, and it’s going to change Wall Street
Like every move a player makes in a game of chess, every trade changes the potential outcome, Kearns says. Machine-learning algorithms are designed to examine possible scenarios at every point along the way, from beginning to middle to end, and figure out the best choice at each moment.
“And that is where Wall Street is going,” he says. Human traders will still provide insights into the markets, he says; more and more, however, those insights will be based on data rather than intuition.
He calls his program Deep Green. The name recalls IBM’s Deep Blue — and money. DeepGreen evaluates market data, learns from it and scores trading strategies for stocks, options and other investments, he says.
“This doesn’t get rid of the rule of human creativity; it actually makes it more important,” he says. “You have to be in tune with the market and be able to say, ‘I’m smelling something here that’s worth learning about.”’
