Comments on: Poker Bots Destroying Online Poker: What’s Next? The Stock Market, Of Course.

By: Ugly

Ugly — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 12:59:17 +0000

yes I am going to work on the ultimate ATS. Yes, the last ATS is still too buggy. No, I do not expect anyone to sell me an ATS.

By: Hermann

Hermann — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 07:45:31 +0000

So ugly, what are you going to do? Write the ultimate ATS? How come you don’t let your last ATS trade for you? Is it still too buggy yet? Or are you just not smart enough to write one? Or do you expect some “trading expert” to sell the software to you?
Let’s assume you’re right. Computers are superior to humans at trading. Where are you going to get this great trading software from? Write it yourself? Let somebody else write it for you? If it’s the latter, why should they share the software with some day trader if they could just use it themselves to basicallly print money? Do you expect to buy it in the retail market? If it’s true that someday there’ll be only computerized day traders, then I bet, you’ll not employ one of them, but large institutions instead that have enough resources to develop one of this “superintelligent” programs.

By: Ugly

Ugly — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:37:41 +0000

yes, I agree with both of you

By: Berti

Berti — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 20:57:02 +0000

I think it depends who the market participants are.
The more comuters participate in the market, the more they will be successful.
Computers playing against computers!

By: Jason Coleman

Jason Coleman — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 09:29:32 +0000

For the time being, it seems that bots+humans is the way to go in poker and trading. i.e. playing online poker using a program like “poker-tracker” or people with black boxes or other complex trading tools, but pulling the trigger themselves.

Eventually, the software will become so complex in its decision making that it won’t be able to explain why it’s making the play (or trade) it is. Or it could explain it, but a human wouldn’t be able to understand, etc…

However, if we’re beefing up ourselves cyborg-style, by adding RAM or whatever to our brains, we might be able to keep up.

Human brains are great at pattern recognition, and smart systems designers will use humans for that part of the process. I’m thinking of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the folks that show the virtual strippers to people filling out captchas, my own dedupe code at WineLog.net that still works best when there is a human to make the final decision on whether two wine entries are really the same.

When computers become as good as humans are at pattern matching, we can take humans out of the system. Maybe this will happen in 10 years or so.

Then we’ll have a period where humans really feel left out. But we’ll still see systems catored towards humans because it’s easier for us to accept a system that is perhaps sub-optimal -but at least understandable- than a system that we can’t understand and/or control.

And all of this will motivate the cyborg movement…

And maybe for 5-10 years after that we’ll be making humans more computer like rather than making computers more human like. The cyborgs will trade better than pure black boxes because they’ll be closer entangled with ourselves. As cyborgs, our meat+computers have a better understanding of our goals and acceptible risk levels, etc. So the performance of these systems should be better. I think.

And after that, who knows?