[FOM] ordinal notations on wall st

[joeshipman@aol.com]

It's obvious that ordinals are what you need in game theory to 
represent ever-more complex versions of "I know that he knows that (I 
know X, He knows I know X, I know he knows I know X, ...)" which is 
just omega+2 as an ordinal, so if you have a war  between competing 
algorithms trying to outguess each other then this can be interpereted 
in the ordinals.

But I can't believe that a competent mathematician and programmer who 
understands this concept and ordinal notations up to, say, Gamma_0 will 
gain any insight useful in financial practice from the more arcane 
systems of ordinal notations.

-- JS


-----Original Message-----
From: Kenny Easwaran <easwaran at usc.edu>
To: Foundations of Mathematics <fom at cs.nyu.edu>
Sent: Sun, May 30, 2010 9:15 pm
Subject: [FOM] ordinal notations on wall st


Does anyone know anything about 
this?http://christianmarks.wordpress.com/2010/05/25/mathematical-logic-fi
nds-unexpected-application-on-wall-street/Unfortunately, the post 
didn't have any links to examples of this, orany discussion of how it 
works, but somehow the idea of basing tradingstrategies on 
proof-theoretic ordinals, with companies trying to movefarther up the 
ordinal hierarchy to get better strategies, sounds justbarely within 
the realm of plausibility.If anyone can confirm that this is actually 
real, and not just made upby the blog author, that would be quite 
interesting.Kenny 
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