Cracking Wall Street

Suppose you could discern market trends, speed up time to see where those trends were going, then bet on what you discovered. Geeks in suits are doing that today. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. I was sitting on a sofa in the guru's office. I trekked to this high mountain outpost a couple of years ago to arrive at one of the planet's power points, the national research labs at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The guru's office was decorated with colorful posters of past conferences that traced the almost mythical career of this high-tech legend: from a maverick physics student who formed an underground band of hippie hackers to break the bank at Las Vegas with a wearable computer, to a principal character in a renegade band of scientists who invented the accelerating science of chaos by studying a dripping faucet, to a founding father of the artificial life movement, to the head of a small lab investigating the new science of complexity in an office kitty-corner to the museum of atomic weapons at Los Alamos -- the office I had trekked to. The guru, Doyne Farmer, looked like Ichabod Crane in a bolo tie. Tall, bony, probably thirty-something, Doyne (pronounced Doan) was about to embark on his next remarkable adventure. He was starting a company to beat the odds on Wall Street by predicting stock prices with computer simu-lations. He was going to hack the global economy. Money is just a type of information, a pattern that, once digitized, becomes subject to persistent programmatic hacking by the mathematically skilled. As the information of money swishes around the planet, it leaves in its wake a history of its flow, and if any of that complex flow can be anticipated, then the hacker who cracks the pattern will become a rich hacker. Some sort of financial hacking has been around as long as computers.