Congratulations to Polaris for winning the Man-Machine Poker Competition in Las Vegas. I knew you could do it. Polaris 2.0 won the event with 3 wins, 2 losses and 1 tie - beating Matt Hawrilenko and other competitors convincingly by winning both sides of a duplicate match.
Computers have long been the best chess players. How long before they are the best day traders? I would say there is a good chance that they already are.

“There are two really big changes in Polaris over last year,” said professor Michael Bowling, who supervised graduate students who programmed Polaris. “First of all, our poker model is much expanded over last year–its much harder for humans to exploit weaknesses. And secondly, we have added an element of learning, where Polaris identifies which common poker stratagy a human is using and switches its own strategy to counter. This complicated the human players ability to compare notes, since Polaris chose a different strategy to use against each of the humans it played,” Bowling said.

“Repeatedly, I heard players exclaim that they had never seen a human do that before,” said Bowling. “Switching strategies really threw the humans for a loop.”

Even though Polaris beat the humans in Las Vegas, the University of Alberta group said it expects to be asked for rematches by the vanquished pros as well as by other poker experts who will claim the win by Polaris was a fluke. “Even after Deep Blue beat Kasparov, there were still some skeptics, and I think the same is true here,” said Bowling. “Over the next year or so there are going to have to be several rematches before everyone is convinced that humans have been surpassed by machines in poker.”

I’ve been taking a high dose of resveratrol every day for about a year now, so I was happy to see this article in wired about new strong evidence of its benefits in anti-aging.

“For the first time, we can mimic caloric restriction in an otherwise healthy animal,” said study co-author David Sinclair, a Harvard University biologist and co-founder of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals. “That’s been the goal of the field for decades. We didn’t know it was possible to let an animal eat whatever it wants, but still get the benefits. We now have evidence.”

Regardless of mouse weight and diet, resveratrol worked wonders. At two years of age, or the mouse equivalent of senescence, the mice were more coordinated than their non-dosed counterparts. Their bones were thicker and stronger, their eyes free of cataracts, their hearts beating strong. At the cellular level, tissues displayed gene-level changes almost identical to those produced by caloric restriction.

“The mice had tremendous health benefits from taking resveratrol,” said de Cabo. “If any of those parameters translate to humans, it will be tremendous.”

Dr. Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, says that we are due for an “economic singularity” (previous examples are the invention of agriculture and the Industrial Revolution) that will cause dramatic accelerations in growth.

If a new transition were to show the same pattern as the past two, then growth would quickly speed up by between 60‑ and 250-fold. The world economy, which now doubles in 15 years or so, would soon double in somewhere from a week to a month. If the new transition were as gradual (in power-law terms) as the Industrial Revolution was, then within three years of a noticeable departure from typical fluctuations, it would begin to double annually, and within two more years, it might grow a million-fold. If the new transition were as rapid as the agricultural revolution seems to have been, change would be even more sudden…

The invention of nanofactories will cause this to happen. Diamonds can now be created in labs - imagine when you will be able to create anything you want from your home nanofactory at the cost of basic raw materials?
I agree with Peter Thiel - that our only option is to bet aggressively long.

Here is what Kurzweil says about it in his book, The Singularity is Near:

Computer language translation continues to improve gradually. Because this is a Turing-level task - that is, it requires full human-level understanding of language to perform at human levels - it will be one of the last application areas to compete with human performance.

This is really cool:

I can’t wait for the future.

Stock traders understand this price psychology pretty well.

In the case of the iPhone, the initial price of the device when it was released last year was $599. Then it dropped to $399…

“It establishes a reference price of $600, and now when it comes down — that’s very, very exciting,” said Dan Ariely, a Duke University behavioral economist and the author of “Predictably Irrational,” a book about how we make decisions. “We compare it to the higher price. I don’t know if Steve Jobs planned this or not, but if he manipulated based on anchoring, he did a very nice trick.”

If it weren’t for Android, I definitely would buy one of the new iPhones. I’m trying to hold out for an Android phone, even with the delays.
I am very excited about the future of mobile applications. With GPS there are so many possibilities. It is going to change the world.

As with everything else in technology, these will improve exponentially.

The price of diamonds is going to drop like a rock - they can now “grow a more perfect diamond than we can find in nature.” All of you chumps who bought diamonds for your loved ones (myself included) basically threw your money out the window.
The great thing about this is not all of the new jewelry we can wear, or the fact that we are chumps, but all of the applications for technology:

At the heart of almost every electrical device is a semiconductor, which transmits electricity only under certain conditions. For the past 50 years, the devices have been made almost exclusively from silicon, a metal-like substance extracted from sand. It has two significant drawbacks, however: it is fragile and overheats. By contrast, diamond is rugged, doesn’t break down at high temperatures, and its electrons can be made to carry a current with minimal interference.

Apollo has used profits from its gemstones to underwrite its foray into the $250 billion semiconductor industry. The company has a partnership Bryant Linares declines to confirm to produce semiconductors specialized for purposes he declines to discuss. But he revealed to me that Apollo is beginning to sell one-inch diamond wafers. “We anticipate that these initial wafers will be used for research and development purposes in our clients’ product development efforts,” Linares says.

This is the beginning of the Diamond Age.

Finally. The brain-computer interface headset is finally here. Chuck your keyboard and mouse out the window, write a check for $299, and sit back and let your brain do all the work:

To help players master the art of moving on-screen objects solely through concentration, the headset will come bundled with a game, set on a magical mountain, that includes practice exercises, said Geoffrey Mackellar, Emotiv’s research and development manager. “You clear the mind,� he said, and then do 30 to 40 seconds of training, by concentrating, for instance, on visualizing a block lifting from the earth. “On the first or second attempt, you can lift it at will.�

…The system doesn’t just lift boulders. It can also detect some of a player’s facial expressions and emotional responses: smile, frown or wink, for instance, and an avatar on screen can do so, too. Grow bored during a battle, and the system can detect ennui and supply a few dragons, or change the music. The device tracks a total of about 30 responses.

…Players of shooting games, for instance, may use eye movement to trigger a shot, shaving milliseconds off of their response time and sparing their hands.

Just imagine what impact this will have on trading. You think the NYSE has changed a lot in recent years? Just wait.
And make very sure to keep your firewall and anti-virus software up to date (although I would still probably be able to hack into your headset and control your mind with the use of anonymous proxy servers).

The new Roadrunner supercomputer is more than twice as fast as BlueGene/L, making it the first petaflop capable computer. It uses Red Hat Linux and has “almost 7,000 AMD Opteron dual core processors and almost 13,000 IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs in special designed TriBlades connected by Infiniband.” You can read the complete system overview here [pdf].

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

IBM is doing a lot of very cool stuff. Anytime anyone asks me for a safe stock to invest in, I recommend IBM. They are also working on the Blue Brain project.
IBM is helping to drive us to the Singularity, and I think they will make a lot of money along the way.