7 ms·
An artist who trained rats to trade in foreign-exchange markets (2014)
- mrbluecoat 2y agoReminds me of Mr. Goxx https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59432659 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59432659
- anoncow 2y agorattraders.com is now a Yoga website with Lorem Ipsum text.
- yojo 2y agoFound it in the Wayback machine, had to go back a few years: https://web.archive.org/web/20150111121618/http://www.rattraders.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150111121618/http://www.rattra...
- log_n 2y agoYeah the problem is that the average rat lives for less than four years, which doesn't let them see multiple market cycles. We must selectively breed or biologically engineer longer lived rats or else we will be curve fitting for a single market regime.
- cs702 2y agoBrilliant. The artist's website[a] described the program perfectly using the soul-crushing jargon of corporate bureaucracy: > Our program is a professional service to the financial industry; rats are being trained to become superior traders in the financial markets. Using our own methodology in accordance with well-established animal training techniques, our subjects learn to recognize pattens in historical stock and futures data as well as generating trading signals. We provide solutions for tick based trading data and day based data. RATTRADERS rats can be trained exclusively for any financial market segment. They outperform most human traders and represent a much more economic solution for your trading desk. Left unsaid is that many human traders are subjected to similar Pavlovian "training" -- and are treated with about as much kindness and dignity as those rats. --- [a] https://web.archive.org/web/20150111121618/http://www.rattraders.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150111121618/http://www.rattra...
- notahacker 2y agoFeels positively factual and hype-free compared with your average AI recommendation startup...
- conductr 2y agoIt’s a rat race out there…
- andrewmutz 2y ago> Left unsaid is that many human traders are subjected to similar Pavlovian "training" -- and are treated with about as much kindness and dignity as those rats. Is this art a statement about how poorly society treats the financial services industry?
- morgango 2y agohttps://archive.is/1WYkr https://archive.is/1WYkr
- polsevev 2y agoMichael Reeves did it first with his goldfish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USKD3vPD6ZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USKD3vPD6ZA
- moussore 2y agoThe rat race literally :)
- rsynnott 2y agoI mean, imagine the savings in cocaine alone!
- kasey_junk 2y agoAdderrall these days: https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/young-banker-finance-adhd-medication-adderall-d578a16f?st=43uWGz&reflink=article_copyURL_share https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/young-banker-finance-adh...
- rsynnott 2y agoTsk. No respect for tradition.
- anticensor 2y agoOverdose of anti-ADHD stimulants have possibly lethal side effects.
- zahlman 2y ago(2014)
- K0balt 2y agoWe can add this to my meth fueled cyberneticly outfitted cutlass chimpanzees
- keiferski 2y agoThis seems like a great opportunity to share this amusing dialogue from Cosmopolis, a Don DeLillo book and its film adaptation by David Cronenberg: "There's a poem I read in which a rat becomes the unit of currency." "Yes. That would be interesting," Chin said. "Yes. That would impact the world economy." "The name alone. Better than the dong or the kwacha." "The name says everything." "Yes. The rat," Chin said. "Yes. The rat closed lower today against the euro." "Yes. There is growing concern that the Russian rat will be devalued." "White rats. Think about that." "Yes. Pregnant rats." "Yes. Major sell-off of pregnant Russian rats." "Britain converts to the rat," Chin said. "Yes. Joins trend to universal currency." "Yes. U.S. establishes rat standard." "Yes. Every U.S. dollar redeemable for rat." "Dead rats." "Yes. Stockpiling of dead rats called global health menace.* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyaA3rWWHHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyaA3rWWHHs
- sailfast 2y agoYes. Ratcoin virtual rats spike to new high after dead rats cause health menace.
- rdiddly 2y agoYes. The ratchain.
- itronitron 2y agoI'd like one strawberry tart without so much rat in it.
- eidorb 2y agoYes. Infest the rats' nest.
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoYes. all hail King Gizzard
- the_sleaze_ 2y agoMs.Kleinworth3 had a real gift for stock picking. It's about the time of the year for the chimps to throw darts at the wall and try their luck against wall street https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickferri/2012/12/20/any-monkey-can-beat-the-market/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickferri/2012/12/20/any-monkey...
- yawpitch 2y agoIs this really any different than what brokerages have been doing for years? Oh, sorry, actual rats.
- lawlessone 2y ago2014. They've probably all been replaced by algorathmic trading by now.
- leoc 2y agoManhattan-Project styled Big Science megaproject to fully simulate a rat brain by 2050 so that it can be trained to trade the cable ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_(foreign_exchange) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_(foreign_exchange) ).
- lucianbr 2y agoThere must be some LLM based trading bot, no? Must be. There's AI toothbrushes for Christ's sake.
- asdfman123 2y agoI interviewed at Two Sigma in 2018 and got the impression they were already getting very deeply into using AI. I'm sure they are using LLMs to analyze news articles, etc. I bet a high schooler has probably hooked up an LLM to a trading bot. If you can imagine ANYTHING can be used to gain a market edge, there are probably scores of very smart people who are trying it/have tried it/have figured out it wouldn't work. The only exceptions are if it's something so small a big firm wouldn't care much about it, or you have special knowledge of a technology that most people barely know about.
- gopher_space 2y ago> The only exceptions are if it's something so small a big firm wouldn't care much about it The interesting part about this is the value of "small".
- asdfman123 2y agoTrue. "Small" can mean many millions of dollars.
- devops99 2y agoRats can drive little cars if you give them the right brain computer interface. Rats are gangster.
- CobrastanJorji 2y agoBrain/computer interface? You can just give them a lever. Rats absolutely love driving: https://theconversation.com/im-a-neuroscientist-who-taught-rats-to-drive-their-joy-suggests-how-anticipating-fun-can-enrich-human-life-239029 https://theconversation.com/im-a-neuroscientist-who-taught-r... So do orangutans, actually, who can easily operate human vehicles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ_0ImDYrPY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ_0ImDYrPY
- dhosek 2y agoLevers are brain computer interfaces.
- semi-extrinsic 2y agoI've also heard from people who worked in chemical process plants in regions where there are monkeys, that they love to turn valves, push buttons and generally imitate human operators. So they have to use lots of locks to ensure only humans can control the process.
- neom 2y agoIt's been a good year on hackernews, this is I believe my 3rd occasion where i get to show off Shadow the Rat's best tricks compilation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV9z0c1hjnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV9z0c1hjnA
- lukol 2y agoI wonder if a well trained rat can beat an AI in terms of prediction quality per energy spent. "Buy a bunch of H200s and build a SMR next to the data center? Nah, just take these rats and feed them for 3 years."
- lxgr 2y agoSince learning that pigeons can compete with radiologists in terms of accuracy for mammography screenings [1], I'm willing to believe almost anything. Turns out neural nets really are pretty good at pattern matching/function approximation! [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34878151 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34878151
- neom 2y agoThe woman who can smell parkinsons, also fascinating: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/magazine/parkinsons-smell-disease-detection.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/magazine/parkinsons-smell...
- zeristor 2y agoThank you, I read about this story years ago, but this is a fuller telling of the story. So much promise but I had not heard of any updates on progress on either Parkinson’s detection, or the identification of the metabolites that make the smell. This in turn raises another question about the acute sense of smell, is this like the people who have four cones in the eye and so can see a whole set of colours? I think this genetic mutation only occurs in women, I guess the genetics of olfaction are a lot more complicated. Should photos be taken to accommodate for these four sets of cone colours, adding a new level for RGB? Very few people can see it, but there’s surely a demand.
- pavel_lishin 2y agoMy understanding of tetrachromacy is that it's duplicates the red cones, and shifts their sensitivity a very tiny amount - the suspicion is that it doesn't meaningfully change subjective color perception at all, and at best makes tetrachromats very slightly better at distinguishing shades of red that would appear identical to us regular trichromats. It would be very exciting if some humans had a mutation that let them be sensitive to something further than our standard three!
- lxgr 2y agoThere's also a podcast episode with her that I really enjoyed: https://www.npr.org/2020/03/23/820009335/invisibilia-an-unlikely-superpower https://www.npr.org/2020/03/23/820009335/invisibilia-an-unli...
- aanet 2y agoFantastic What a commentary on the traders of today. "Remember, even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat." Now that Wall St financiers are studied (chimps, rats), we now need a study of Sili Valley VCs. Rats-as-VCs, yes?
- vdupras 2y agoNot rats, vultures! Vulture Capitalists is a catchy name!
- samstriker 2y agohttps://www.vice.com/en/article/rattraders-0000519-v21n12/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/rattraders-0000519-v21n12/ -- article by the artist in title
- motohagiography 2y agoSeems like pulling punches to call this art or a joke. If we can simplify the UX on a technology that creates value to where animals can use it, that's an amazing technology. It's likely that we can use AI (not necessary tho) to interpret human interfaces to find and create symbolic games with analogous dynamics that can be "played" or managed by animals. doing this for FX is a great insight as that market is relatively pure or efficient from an information perspective. Rats are interesting, but building this for crows could be a game changer. Avian arbitrage.
- yuppiepuppie 2y agoIf we did it with male cows, it would be quite literally a “bull-market”.
- whimsicalism 2y agopulling punches? not sure you’re using that idiom correctly, “selling it short” would match better
- motohagiography 2y agoon the idiom, pulling punches means not following through on a criticism, like saying "hah, only joking!" or, "don't challenge me it's just art!", where selling it short means describing it as less than it could be. They're related, but no, I did not misuse an idiom. however, for people whose first language isn't english I could accept the idiom is a bit opaque for a public forum.
- whimsicalism 2y agoi’m a native english speaker. the reason your usage is incorrect is because what you are saying is they didn’t sufficiently recognize the ‘amazing’ potential of these ideas, the exact opposite of the criticism implied by pulling punches. ask chatgpt or something to arbitrate, i’m confident it would agree with me
- 2y ago
- gosub100 2y agorelated: Michael Reeves' I Gave My Goldfish $50,000 to Trade Stocks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USKD3vPD6ZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USKD3vPD6ZA
- dolmen 2y agoDate: 2014
- joeyo 2y agoSee also: Marzullo, Rantze, and Gage. Stock Market Behavior Predicted by Rat Neurons. Annals of Improbable Research. Vol 12, No 4. July-August 2006. https://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume12/v12i4/rats-12-4.pdf https://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume12/v12i4/rat...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- GloriousKoji 2y agoThis is quite neat. They translate market numbers into tones and the rats make selections on what they think the next tone will be. I would say it's actual speculation and not random dart throwing like the crypto trading hamster or stock picking goldfish we've seen in the recent years.
- fsckboy 2y agothat's not the financial definition of speculation. The proper definition of speculation (by proper I mean "the only one that works; all others will be flawed") is "any investment that increases the overall risk of your portfolio". (and a hedge is "any investment that decreases the overall risk of your portfolio".) neurons predicting the future may be hedging
- lisper 2y ago"Marcovici says that they were outperforming human traders after a few months of training—a claim, though, that’d require testing more thorough than what was done here." Yeah, that's an important hedge there at the end. Also, I think it's cruel to train the rats with electric shocks when they get it wrong. So while I love this as art and social commentary, the devil is still very much to be found in the details.
- to1y 2y ago>I think it's cruel to train the rats with electric shocks when they get it wrong. This stuck out to me also. I don't mind a joke but not if someone/something has to get tortured for it.
- beyondCritics 2y agoIf it would actually work, would you use that service? Or would you feel some kind of unease?
- TacticalCoder 2y agoSomehow I feel like a similar artistic statement but about bureaucracy and regulations wouldn't have made it to The Atlantic? Something about RATBUREAUCRATS making CARREERRATS fills as many Suspicious Activity Report (SARs) as they can, on any individual whose head stands but a bit higher than others? That's the problem with these things: they can be made about just anything. Now as long as neither that artist nor The Atlantic are funded by any public fund, I've got nothing against it. People should be free to speak, perform and write about art. Just as I should be free to make one about RATBUREAUCRATS creating mountains of regulations (and I wouldn't take any public money to do so).
- noamchompsit 2y agoOnecould train SWEs to trade in foreign-exchange markets, which is at a lower level,so what?
- foundart 2y agohttps://archive.is/2LLoC https://archive.is/2LLoC archive of the whole article