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Haha, amused to see this pop up on HN. I was the lead programmer on it. Nothing quite makes you feel quite so connected to the national legislative process as

• jamespitts 16y ago
  I was working at the Hollywood Stock Exchange at the time and was completely perplexed by the "betting parlor" hyperbole used by the opposing congressmen. It seemed to me that the actual players of the game would be much more interested in the status of making the right call or in creating content than any money they might earn. If you are able to comment on this, what were the underlying pricing mechanics of the market? How were new securities going to be created? Heh, to think that simulated stock market software might be classified...
  • dminor 16y ago
    We used Robin Hanson's logarithmic market scoring rule (http://hanson.gmu.edu/mktscore.pdf http://hanson.gmu.edu/mktscore.pdf). The combinatorial aspect allowed us to try to answer questions about the correlation between different securities in the market - hopefully more interesting for policy analysis than a simple predictor of the future. The main securities in the market were 5 statistics that we were tracking quarterly in 8 different Mid-East countries (things like civil stability, military activity, US aid, etc). Then there were supposed to be a handful of one-off type events; we hadn't decided on them yet, but gave some "ripped from the headlines" examples that were the main focus of the criticism. The values of all these securities were to be judged by the Economist Intelligence Unit.