Perpetual Motion

At age thirteen, I invented a perpetual motion device. Obviously, I was a genius. Recognizing the magnitude of my discovery, I decided to patent the machine in order to capture the associated rewards. Years of groping through Popular Science magazine — it was my pre-pubescent version of pornography — meant I knew where to find patent lawyers: pages -1 through page -5.

Excitedly, I called the patent attorney that seemed to be the most affordable. I confidently declared that I had invented a perpetual motion machine and required a patent. The attorney did not seem impressed. Apparently, I was not the first person to try and patent a perpetual motion device. In hindsight,  I am willing to bet that patent attorneys who advertise with Popular Science magazine are continuously flooded with similar claims. After signaling irritation that was detectable even to a thirteen year old, she informed me that she would send the requisite forms but could not proceed without a fully functional prototype to submit as evidence. Apparently, this guy named Newton did not think perpetual motion was possible, so the patent office was not very liberal in awarding patents for such inventions (anymore).

I proceeded immediately. First, I spent my accumulated birthday money on magnets from Edmund’s Scientific. Next, I used K’NEX to build the scaffolding for a ring of magnets that would surround the central magnetic rotor. When the magnets arrived, I hastily lashed them to my plastic toys and and let ‘er rip. The magnet slowly swung around before settling in at the weakest point of the rings magnetic field.

Frustrated, I retrenched and thought about what had gone wrong. I was able to deduce that the magnetic fields of the independent magnets become part of a system when joined with the other magnets. They would not independently push the rotor — it didn’t work like that. However, committed to my brilliance, I thought of various ways to work around the problem such as using the momentum of half-filled water canisters to overcome the “humps”. Obviously, I did not overturn the laws of the universe. My idea may have been naive, but I learned a lot about systems while enjoying the exhilaration of experimentation. This experience may have had a major impact on my life.

Hacking

When I was young (before my attempt at overturning the laws of the universe), I asked my father to help me learn how to program. Since these were the days of DOS and Norton Commander, QBasic was to be my playground. Although I learned basic programming logic, I did not progress far enough to be capable of implementing a Gorrillas clone. Sadly, given my age, I enjoyed the instantaneous rewards associated with sports more than the personal satisfaction offered by solving problems with computers. My growth as a programmer was arrested.

Then came the movie Hacker’s. Hacker’s resurrected my interest in programming. Hacker’s — with the help of a young Angelina Jolie — gave programming sex appeal. It became my ambition to become ‘Cereal Killer’ (seriously, Zero Cool/Crash Override was boring).

This happened to be the same era of AOL ‘proggies’ and ICQ. For about six months, a friend and I ran a site called The Digital Underground that was a AOL themed repository while also releasing our own 133t apps. We were cool. We knew it.

That lasted for at most nine months. That is roughly the intellectual half-life of VB, even to a young programmer. I left that world behind and ventured out to C, C++,  and Python. Using better tools, I made applications that were reasonably complex and much more rewarding: spam-bots.

Now, I was a h4×0r. Around freshman year of high school, I was making 1-2k a week working after school. This was when I started hating school. Partially because my after-school work was much more intellectually challenging and mostly because I was making “bank”.

Fortunately, my career in spam was not to be. After a little more than a year, my parents had caught on — they did not approve. This shifted my efforts to a more worthwhile and exponentially more challenging arena: markets.

The Contemporary Philosopher’s Stone

I think reading Matt Ridley’s, The Origins of Virtue, in 9th grade seeded my intellectual development (thanks, Mr. Ridley). I became fasinated with complex systems like Conway’s Game of Life, Rule 30, ants, and Axelrod. Nothing was more interesting to me than Cellular Automata, ANN’s, PSO, and genetic algorithms. Soon, I realized there was a potentially practical application. With spamming out of the way, I now combined all my interests: programming, complex systems, and trying to do the supposedly impossible. I set out to beat the market.

This is not a huge leap from my past projects. There are strong parallels between perpetual motion and trying to overcome the efficient market hypothesis. And, just like with past projects, my efforts led to procuring new tools. At various stages in the past eight years (I am still pursuing this path), I have become proficient or better in ASM x86, C, C++, Java, Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Erlang, PHP (front-end), Pascal, and Haskell. I have reproduced many popular financial models while trying to understand and improve them. This was all far more rigorous than that I was being exposed to in school (undergrad) at the time.

This brings me to now. I have spent the past 8 years trying to come up with an algorithm that finds pockets of profitability in a cloud of probable randomness. This has given me what I believe is a powerful understanding of complex systems. Complex systems modeled on computers have become my contemporary Legos — and, I want to play all day long.

In all likelihood, I will not make a breakthrough discovery. The fog that is my ambition may be obscuring reality. I am exploring an alternate area of the landscape of solutions. I may be hill-climbing a local unexplored minima — but hold out because of the potential for maxima. However, f*ck it. I want to spend my time doing what I enjoy most.