Gli algoritmi come forza evolutiva?

Profili di montagne che imitano indici di borsa: ecco un video sull'algorithmic trading davvero molto molto ben fatto tratto da www.ted.com.  Kevin Slavin ci invita a ripensare al ruolo della matematica nel mondo contemporaneo:

...I want to propose today that we rethink a little bit about the role of contemporary math -- not just financial math, but math in general.That its transition from being something that we extract and derive from the world to something that actually starts to shape it -- the world around us and the world inside us. And it's specifically algorithms, which are basically the math that computers use to decide stuff. They acquire the sensibility of truth, because they repeat over and over again. And they ossify and calcify, and they become real.

Oltre a ricordare il flash crash e le stranezze del trading ad alta frequenza documentate da
nanex nel video scopriamo che gli algoritmi che assegnano un prezzo ai libri venduti da Amazon
possono pure prendere delle robuste cantonate:

And the gag is that, of course, these aren't just running through the market. You can find these kinds of things wherever you look, once you learn how to look for them. You can find it here: this book about flies that you may have been looking at on Amazon. You may have noticed it when its price stared at 1.7 million dollars. It's out of print -- still ...(Laughter) If you had bought it at 1.7, it would have been a bargain. A few hours later, it had gone up to 23.6 million dollars, plus shipping and handling.And the question is: Nobody was buying or selling anything; what was happening? And you see this behavior on Amazon as surely as you see it on Wall Street. And when you see this kind of behavior, what you see is the evidence of algorithms in conflict, algorithms locked in loops with each other, without any human oversight,without any adult supervision to say, "Actually, 1.7 million is plenty."