A good analogy is gold farming in a game like WoW: bots killing off pigs and cows, collecting the in-game gold and selling it on eBay for US dollars. Quants are

A good analogy is gold farming in a game like WoW: bots killing off pigs and cows, collecting the in-game gold and selling it on eBay for US dollars. Quants are in the stock farming business. Both are "hard" in the programming/modeling sense, both are about liquidity and the WoW analogy helps one to see both are about beating the rules (and other farmers!) in a "virtual world".