I ran across this video of a guy who took some clock pieces and using genetic algorithms, evolved them into a clock. Of course, this was only a simulation that run on his computer, but nevertheless it is pretty fascinating and clearly shows the power of the evolutionary process over a long period of time.
Financial data has now gone open source. The company Opentick has an api that allows you to get real time streaming quotes of your favorite stocks using you favorite programming language. The software that Opentick has developed is open source as well as the data.
I tried Opentick and wasn’t able to get their sample app to work. I then but I set up a java project and ran their code sample with my login and changed the stock symbol to \YMZ7 which is the current Dow mini futures contract (the futures contract on the DJIA 30) (it is free for real time data) and voila it works. The quotes were streaming in real time to the console window!
But I wondered if this data was valid, so I ran Tradestation and opened up a time and sales window for the ym. I put both programs side by side and hit the print screen button and copied it to paint brush. Every trade in both programs matched up perfectly (all in the same order). I did this about 5 times with no differences. That’s pretty amazing! Not bad for free.
Now they have Nuclear reactors or “drives” that are small enough to bury in your backyard, but strong enough to power a small city. I am thinking about buying one, hooking it up to the electric grid and watch my power meter spin in reverse at 50,000 rpm. Now the power company can start paying me!
I just tried out LINQPad. It is an app that lets you build LINQ queries on sql databases, objects and xml. You can then post this in your c# code and it gives you a collection of objects that represent your data.
Example:
for o in orders
select o.customerid
This would give you a collection of all of the customer ids that you have orders from. Here is a list of examples of LINQ code.