1/28/02
FatKat, Inc. (Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies) is a fledgling investment firm in Wellesley, Mass., founded by inventor and AI evangelist Ray Kurzweil. Although he's currently mum on FatKat, Kurzweil has written about the potential of mathematical formulas known as genetic algorithms to beat the market. The Darwinist process would begin with software randomly generating a million sets of rules for buying and selling stocks. Each set is a financial organism with the rules constituting its DNA. The ones that can't beat the market are killed, while the stock-savvy survivors mutate and breed until the population is back to a million. Rinse and repeat 100,000 times. "The surviving software creatures should be darn smart investors," he writes in The Age of Spiritual Machines.