This is How it is

We lived in the house now for only three months but already the children come. We are careful, living in India, because we are not prepared to battle the diseases strange to our bodies and so we must sometimes inhibit our love for the children until we are stronger. We are strangers to the country but not to the hunger and yearning on the faces of the children. The children are all from one family, and our favorite is the wild little five-year-old girl named Sakri. But aside from this slight preference we laugh and run with her two older brothers, Ramchander and Deysha, and the older and beautiful sister, Mutelly. The tiny baby, Thumpully, doesn\u27t count but only bounces along first on one hip, and then another. This is a family of Untouchables and although the constitution makes them equals the Laws of the Heart do not as yet

Application of multi-agent games to the prediction of financial time-series

We report on a technique based on multi-agent games which has potential use in the prediction of future movements of financial time-series. A third-party game is trained on a black-box time-series, and is then run into the future to extract next-step and multi-step predictions. In addition to the possibility of identifying profit opportunities, the technique may prove useful in the development of improved risk management strategies.Comment: Work presented at the NATO Workshop on Econophysics. Prague (Feb 2001). To appear in Physica

Predictability of large future changes in a competitive evolving population

The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a generic multi-agent population competing for a limited resource, and find that the level of predictability actually increases prior to a large change. These large changes hence arise as a predictable consequence of information encoded in the system's global state.

An Investigation of Crash Avoidance in a Complex System

Complex systems can exhibit unexpected large changes, e.g. a crash in a financial market. We examine the large endogenous changes arising within a non-trivial generalization of the Minority Game: the Grand Canonical Minority Game (GCMG). Using a Markov Chain description, we study the many possible paths the system may take. This 'many-worlds' view not only allows us to predict the start and end of a crash in this system, but also to investigate how such a crash may be avoided. We find that the system can be 'immunized' against large changes: by inducing small changes today, much larger changes in the future can be prevented