I’m old enough so that for me Helen Bannerman was still a “children’s author.” The concept “speed kills” brings up a rather funky image.

It seems to me that the program traders are acting so fast that they have entered a different domain of reality, sort of like where relativity effects become important in physics. I’m willing to entertain the commenter’s implicit assumption that the algorithms the program traders are running may actually have substituted things like the Nash equations for conventional thought and common sense.

Let us
move fast
enough, in a small
enough space, and
our travels
will take first
shape, then substance.

[W]e assembled a panel of 30 respected game theorists around the world, and we sent them a survey asking, “Can you think of any examples of real, live companies that have consciously applied game-theoretical concepts to a real business problem?”

The response was . . . a deafening chorus of head scratching.

“The short answer is, I don’t know,” said David Levine of UCLA. “Let me think about this,” replied MIT’s Muhamet Yildiz.

Others on our expert panel, while not offering up any actual, you know, examples, were willing to speculate on why they couldn’t. Traditional game theory “prescribes a lot of advice that does not actually seem to work,” admitted Paul Bartha of the University of British Columbia.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/91/debunk.html

surely we can merge all the input and have a meta model but the construction of model this scale is too expensive and time consuming to be realistic.