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We're all splitting hairs here, but ...
> well, gary, you've come to my way of thinking in that you can't
> program 100% of a discretionary trader's approach.
Only (in theory) because you can't KNOW 100% of a typical
discretionary trader's approach. AI and Expert System research back
in the 80's and early 90's demonstrated it's damn near impossible to
crawl inside an expert's head and dig out ALL the rules he uses.
In theory, *IF* you could get ALL the rules that a discretionary
trader uses, you could program it. It might be EXTREMELY difficult
to do so given today's technology, especially if the trader relies on
a lot of visual pattern matching, gestalt "feel" of the markets, etc
etc. But it's possible.
IMHO, the problem is not that the brain is capable of doing things
that a computer fundamentally can't do. The problem is that the
brain does those things in mysterious ways, and we don't fully
understand how it does them yet, and we haven't found a good way to
emulate it. We don't *have* to exactly duplicate the brain's
functionality, any more than we have to build a 50-foot bird's wing
to make a 747. We can emulate it with another approach and then
apply brute force (jet engines, CPU horsepower) to make up for the
cruder implementation, and quite possibly do BETTER than the original
-- not too many birds can fly 600mph. But we don't know how to do
that (yet) for a lot of higher brain functions. When we figure it
out, I predict most (not all) discretionary traders will be replaced
by computers just like the accountant with a pencil was replaced by
spreadsheets. But that's a long way off yet.
In practical applications today, it's true that your brain can do
things that no computer can do. Nobody knows what you're doing, so
they can't program it. That's why very few systems work the way
discretionary traders do. The system designers use a totally
different approach that they CAN program.
Gary
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