Software

Enhancing Realities through Visualizing Numbers and Time

Visual Software Intelligence is the name for my code that has produced results for 715 test values from indices and shares with an accuracy of 97.53% as can be seen on www.visualdata.org.co.uk/financial_forecasting.htm. However, I am told that this absolute accuracy is irrelevant because people want to see Buy and Sell directions.

I am also told that the direction is irrelevant because the overall trend matters - not the last turn of the tide. In other words, just as beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, so does relevance lie in the mind of the observer.

What is relevant to me, however, is that this accuracy does not measure prediction but the re-presentation or projection of a present reality along a time line. This projection is not an extrapolation of the ordinary kind. It is a combination of mapping, measuring and visualising realities, just as cameras re-present realities to us.

The reality of trading is measured by the S&P 500. It is presented in numbers, mapped onto curves and re-presented over lines of time as Buy or Sell.

To visualize the future means to extrapolate from the present and to re-present what is and has been. The question is how accurately a 're-presentation' 'represents' the original reality.

Reality takes place over time in 3D space. But the reality of trading as re-presented by the S&P 500 is calculated and illustrated on 2D screens or paper. The fact that I have managed to program a way of producing values that are close to the actual S&P values, is not due to aiming at simulating markets or trading activities. Indeed, the only aim I had was to express in software the mathematical insights I had when I analysed human thinking, writing, measuring and programming.

The ultimate concept that emerged was "3D_TimeSpace" as a way of unifying time, space, movement and measuring. 3D_TimeSpace is considered 'unscientific' - just like "earth is flat and the sun orbits" but it has served me to use S&P 500 data such that its visualization matched the reality that followed later. So far only for a day or a week. But the rewrite has begun and the accuracy of indices and share values so far has encouraged one investment company to put money down for testing specific shares.

Let's face it: predicting the S&P500 is only attractive as the promise of making money thru buying and selling stock. But trading stock is not the reality of 'being' in 3D space. It is a reality created by traditions and institutions based on writing on paper.

The realities that we now present on screens are of a different nature. We don't look at tables of numbers any more, we look at curves. When looking at curves, we don't compare one point with the next one, we only take in the direction of the last point.

If Pythagoras had had a computer, he might have left for us what I am offering as data delivery now and as a web service in future: ways of re-presenting numbers that are not translated from paper based mathematics but suited for the capacity of computers.

There is not only the Descartes way. I have found ways of thinking and programming that are so different from the usual approaches that I have not been able to raise interest from any investors or grant giving bodies. But now my graphs of indices before, during and after 9/11 are hopefully proof of concept. The concept is 3D_TimeSpace as the universe in which numbers are used to count and measure, to compare and calculate: financial, trading and other realities.

(c) Copyright Sabine Kurjo McNeill 25/09/2002 Predicting or Projecting.doc