{"id":946,"date":"2004-08-07T01:45:00","date_gmt":"2004-08-07T01:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/?p=946"},"modified":"2020-08-21T01:47:02","modified_gmt":"2020-08-21T01:47:02","slug":"mandelbrot-and-quantum-mechanics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/2004\/08\/07\/mandelbrot-and-quantum-mechanics\/","title":{"rendered":"Mandelbrot and Quantum Mechanics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>So Father Fractal himself, Benoit Mandelbrot,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wired\/archive\/12.08\/view.html?pg=2?tw=wn_tophead_7\">suggests in his latest book<\/a>\u00a0that computers should be used to search for patterns in the vagaries of the Stock Exchange:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p><em>A well-managed corporation devotes some portion of its research and development budget to basic research, in fields of science that underlie its main business. Isn&#8217;t understanding the market as important to the economy as understanding solid-state physics is to IBM? If we can map the human genome, why can&#8217;t we map how a man loses his livelihood? If millions can contribute a few cycles of their PCs to the search for a signal from outer space, why can&#8217;t they join a coordinated search for patterns in financial markets?<\/em><\/p><cite>Benoit Mandelbrot<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>Wouldn&#8217;t this be a complete waste of time? Assuming you did find a pattern, you couldn&#8217;t do anything with it, because as soon as you took action based on assumptions derived from the pattern, you&#8217;d be changing the system and the pattern would no longer be valid. It&#8217;s not quite\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.users.totalise.co.uk\/~idmon\/observ.htm\">quantum observation<\/a>\u00a0effects, but still&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So Father Fractal himself, Benoit Mandelbrot,\u00a0suggests in his latest book\u00a0that computers should be used to search for patterns in the vagaries of the Stock Exchange: A well-managed corporation devotes some portion of its research and development budget to basic research, in fields of science that underlie its main business. Isn&#8217;t understanding the market as important [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diary","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}