[ExI] Signs of the singularity

[Keith Henson]

>From Slashdot

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| Sudden Demand For Logicians On Wall Street
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|   from the most-popular-guy-on-the-floor dept.
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|   posted by samzenpus on Thursday May 27, @01:46 (Businesses)
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|   https://science.slashdot.org/story/10/05/27/0258245/Sudden-Demand-For-Logicians-On-Wall-Str|
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An anonymous reader writes "In an unexpected development for the
depressed market for mathematical logicians, Wall Street has begun
quietly and aggressively [0]recruiting proof theorists and recursion
theorists for their expertise in applying ordinal notations and ordinal
collapsing functions to high-frequency algorithmic trading. Ordinal
notations, which specify sequences of ordinal numbers of ever increasing
complexity, are being used by elite trading operations to parameterize
families of trading strategies of breathtaking sophistication. The
monetary advantage of the current strategy is rapidly exhausted after a
lifetime of approximately four seconds — an eternity for a machine, but
barely enough time for a human to begin to comprehend what happened. The
algorithm then switches to another trading strategy of higher ordinal
rank, and uses this for a few seconds on one or more electronic
exchanges, and so on, while opponent algorithms attempt the same
maneuvers, risking billions of dollars in the process."

Discuss this story at:
   http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/05/27/0258245

Links:
   0. http://christianmarks.wordpress.com/2010/05/25/mathematical-logic-finds-unexpected-application-on-wall-street/