

Pythonic financial simulation - i2pi
http://blog.i2pi.com/?p=208

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i2pi
I forgot to mention it in the blog post, but there are well defined measures
of code coverage for software development. I'm not sure if the same concepts
have made there way into legal analysis. I would like to see that any
financial portfolio 'stress tests' require complete code coverage.

However, I seriously doubt whether the proposal will ever be enacted. There is
just too much going against it. I do like that agent simulation is becoming
wider known in the broader financial community as it finally gets us closer to
acknowledging that financial instruments _are_ computation. And along with
that association comes the tacit recognition that not everything is easily
computable.

For a good introduction to the intersection of computability and economics,
check out
[http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economic...](http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/9780198295273/toc.html)

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nikete
Velupillai's book is awesome. An exercise of his that I love is looking at how
much of general equilibrium theory one can prove using only constructive math.

A nice blog on a similar vein seems to have been started recentely on
<http://aiecon.tumblr.com/> by a grad student of Sandholm.

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ableal
Interesting blog, showing the banking-side view. The call for 'executable-
regulation' reminded me that lawyers also pride themselves on their fine
analytical minds, piling up sharp clauses to cover this and that.

I suspect that, if they could, and would, run unit tests on their products,
there would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

On the other hand, we already have that with the current system, and that's
perhaps the point of it. The making of sausages, and all that.

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binarymax
" The idea that while ABS documents are chock full of legalese, a computer
program can provide a very concise way of understanding how a financial
instrument is supposed to operate."

That is extremely interesting. A good friend of mine is a lawyer and used to
work on large financial contracts (with sometimes billions of dollars in a
single contract). He would tell me crazy stories about how two legal teams
would spend hours arguing over things like the placement of a semicolon. So in
reality legal contracts really are code...just a code for lawyers and not
computers. I would not be surprised in the least if computer code was more
efficient, but it may take just as long to write (if not longer). The upside
is that while lawyer code needs to be tested in court, computer code gets
tested by compilers and private QA teams, significantly shortening the process
and relieving a significant portion of bureaucracy.

