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> the E.T.F. runs most of its calculations on I.B.M.’s Watson supercomputer Every time I read an article that mentions Watson, it's sprouted a new thing the na
by _delirium 9y ago
> the E.T.F. runs most of its calculations on I.B.M.’s Watson supercomputer
Every time I read an article that mentions Watson, it's sprouted a new thing the name is applied to. Previously it was a question-answering system, which famously won Jeopardy. Then it became a general NLP platform. Then it became a brand name for basically all IBM machine learning offerings. Now it's also a supercomputer?
If what this really means is that they built a bot that plugs a bunch of data into IBM's cloud ML platform and trades on that basis, I'm not really surprised it's not beating the market. Building an auto-trading bot using off the shelf ML techniques is actually a pretty popular university project that's worth trying if you're curious, though (at least with simulated money, or money you can afford to lose). They can probably do better than a typical university project, because I assume they have more extensive financial data feeds. But everyone else serious about automated trading (which lots of people are) also has those data feeds plus the same off-the-shelf ML, so unless they have something else...
- hockeybias 9y agoFrom what I've read and heard, Watson can do whatever the IBM marketing department thinks will sound good for it to do...
- ardit33 9y agoWatson is a marketing term, and a division of IBM. Think of it similar as "Amazon Cloud", which really consists of over 100 different type of services/products, some of them very different, and build by different teams, but the "Amazon Cloud" is more of an umbrella.
- zaphod12 9y agoand one that hasn't been terribly successful in a lot of areas! It's often sold as almost a software/business consulting effort, which requires a ton of money and time to get up and running MD Anderson Cancer Center wasted $62 million on it: https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/02/md-anderson-cancer-centers-ibm-watson-project-fails-journalism-related/ https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/02/md-anderson-cancer-...
- latenightcoding 9y agoI don't like bringing politics into HN, but I like this quote: "IBM Watson is the Donald Trump of the AI industry—outlandish claims that aren’t backed by credible data."
- _delirium 9y agoBut would Bob Dylan really lie to me? ;_;