Posts Tagged review

Calculated Bets by Steven Skiena

April 29, 2010 at 10:24 pm · Filed under Book Review ·Tagged , ,

I just finished reading the book Calculated Bets by Steven Skiena.  When I saw the book mentioned on Hacker News I immediately downloaded it to my Kindle and started reading.  I built a pokerbot before, so I figured I’d enjoy the book.

I did enjoy the book, but I’m not sure that I’m the right audience.  I’m also not sure that this should be a book.  The writing style makes me feel it should be a collection of blog posts.

Even though the book is short, it contains a substantial number of detours that should have been edited out.  For example, he spent several pages talking about 1) why programmers dislike Microsoft and, 2) what the Y2K crisis was all about.

Furthermore, I found the author’s professorial tone at times endearing and at times annoying.  I appreciated his descriptions of writing a program to predict football games when he was a teenager, and then convincing his local paper to publish his quotes.  I also enjoyed his recounting of his graduate student years at the University of Illinois.  The book also concludes nicely, with Skiena listing several fun projects that the reader might want to dig into.

On the other hand, for most of the book, the author depicts himself as an outdated Computer Science professor who doesn’t know how to code.  For example, he had to recruit grad students to write programs to fetch and parse simple web pages from the jai alai websites.  The description of that project phase included an awkward description of the Perl programming language.  I found it awkward because he didn’t convey his own love for coding Perl.  Instead, he seemed awe struck that his student could hammer out Perl code that parsed a web page.

Also, the book was ultimately too amateurish on the gambling topics.  Most glaringly, he never touched on risk of ruin.  He deposited $250 with the off track bettor and started making daily bets, as dictated by the program, of around $100 per day.  At one point he nearly went bust, but luckily bounced up.  I would have liked to see him talk about expected variance, including some notion of what his limits were for deciding that a losing streak was more than a bad turn of luck.

Finally, in terms of cold cash, the ultimate results aren’t impressive.  After all of the time spent, both by him and his cheap (free) student labor, I think he made a couple thousand bucks in a year, on an investment of $250.  Then he got spooked about legal issues and also wasn’t able to maintain the code after his students left.  So he shut the whole thing down.  In my opinion, if you’re going to go work so hard to create a winning program, you should have the drive to squeeze some serious money out of it.

Having said all that, I enjoyed the book.  I’m happy that Skiena wrote it, and I appreciate his passion for systematically gambling on jai alai.  Hopefully he’ll write up a summary (without detours) of his efforts on a blog and also provide all of his data and code.  Then maybe some other hackers will dive in and push his system further down the track.

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Exit Through the Gift Shop

April 26, 2010 at 11:13 pm · Filed under Movie Review ·Tagged , ,

Last night I saw Banksy’s new film, Exit Through the Gift Shop.  It’s an excellent documentary.  I found it really inspiring.  In fact, today I started an art project which is directly inspired by one of Invader’s pieces.  I’ll post pictures of it when I’m finished.  (I’m enjoying my week off of work before I start my new job).

One question I had when I left the movie was, what if Mr. Brainwash is just one of Banksy’s creations?  After thinking about it more today, I think the odds are pretty good.  I hope that’s the case, because it would be a master stroke.

If you get the chance, definitely check out the film.

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Review of Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley

October 22, 2009 at 10:21 pm · Filed under Book Review ·Tagged , ,

I just finished reading Programming Pearls by Jon Bentley.  This is a collection of his “Programming Pearls” columns for the Communications of the ACM magazine.  Bentley shares stories about implementing fundamental data structures and algorithms.

My biggest takeaway was Bentley’s authoritative yet humble tone.  This stands in contrast to the high bravado and chest thumping that defines so much technical communication in the current realm of blogs and tweets.  These days it seems that every writer is a gladiator who’s foremost goal is to demonstrate technical superiority.  It’s king of the cage for nerds.

Bentley, a researcher at Xerox PARC, and a CMU professor who advised Charles Leiserson, is certainly a king of the technical cage.  Even so, he makes you feel like he’s a coworker discussing his current project during lunch.  My mind  was generating imaginary suggestions for implementation techniques instead of simply digesting his word as gospel.

The columns typically highlight personalized implementation stories which often involve now antiquated machines such as the PDP-11.  One personal anecdote that I really appreciated was Ed Reingold’s solution to a toy problem of searching for a missing integer.  Bentley mentions that Reingold uses the question on one of his quizzes.  Prof Reingold was my undergraduate advisor, and these are exactly the type of questions that he asked on his quizzes, which I always thoroughly enjoyed.

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Book Review: Nerds on Wall Street by David Leinweber

August 11, 2009 at 10:50 pm · Filed under Book Review ·Tagged , , , ,

This weekend I read David Leinweber’s book Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets.  While sitting at Radiance Tea, I read a book review in the Wall Street Journal.  Since I had previously enjoyed David’s chapter in How I Became a Quant, I paid $24 and instantly downloaded it to my Kindle.

David’s has a clear, concise, and humorous writing style.  Also, since I’m also a (significantly more junior) nerd on Wall Street, I’m in his target audience.

My big takeaway is the sense of pragmaticism and passion that oozes out of his stories. It’s clear that technology makes him tick, and that he’s always right on top of the newest techniques.  And he’s been at it for years, so his stories all carry true gravitas.

Data mining while developing quantitative strategies is one principal theme that’s addressed in most of the book’s chapters.  Personally, I wish he had addressed this in greater detail.  It’s easy to dismiss eggregious data mining that links butter production to S&P returns.  It’s also easy to say “withhold data from your training data.” I also felt that when he discussed a specific example of using genetic programming, he essentially admitted that the strategy was datamined, yet restrained by common sense.

I recommend this book.  It’s a quick and enjoyable read about an interesting topic.

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Review of OmniGraphSketcher

March 26, 2009 at 4:14 pm · Filed under software ·Tagged , , ,

Last night I downloaded OmniGraphSketcher and gave it a test drive.  I’m a huge fan of OmniGraffle, OmniGroup’s diagramming program, so I was curious to see what their new graphing program had to offer.  In short, I like the usability that it inherited from OmniGraffle, but they need to make several improvements before I would even consider paying them $29.95.

For years I’ve been searching for a graphing platform that helps me quickly create Tufte-quality graphics.  I’ve had the best luck with programming-based environments such as NodeBox, Processing, or PSTricks (within LaTeX).  Back in 2000 I even wrote my own framework called TexLogo, which was a language and interactive system for illustrating Latex documents with logo turtle graphics. These frameworks are all drawing programs with an API.  As such, they give you the finest level of control with the unfortunate downside of being labor intensive.  Whenever you use them you risk diving down the rabbit hole.

The other end of the spectrum are programs that easily produce bad or misleading graphs.  Excel and gnuplot easily crank out ugly graphics.

So I like OmniGraphSketcher’s approach.  The program mixes hand-guided drawing with x-y data coordinate locations.  The default result is clean and sharp, just like diagrams that come out of OmniGraffle.  Unfortunately it’s not a finished product.  Specifically, I need it to include the following:

  1. Units other than foating point numbers.  Most importantly, they need to add support for dates.  You can’t draw a time series graph with the program.
  2. Titles.  Yes, you can double click to add a label, but there’s no built in support for title or sub-titles.
  3. Legends.  This can also be done manually, but they could facilitate it so that you can link data points or series with a legend.
  4. More options for the axes.  For example I’d like the option to only show tick marks.  And I’d like the ability to only show specific tick marks.  I don’t want to be forced to use evenly spaced tick marks.

If the OmniGroup developers make these improvements, then I’m likely to send them thirty bucks.

Here’s a quick example graph that I threw together.

omnigraphsketcher_visits1

Here’s something closer to what I’d like that I made with OmniGraffle.

omnigraffle_visits

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Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers

December 30, 2008 at 1:03 am · Filed under Book Review ·Tagged

Enticed by the buzz, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.  In this short book, Gladwell gives his perspective on several events that are significantly outside the norm.  He moves from hockey stars to billionaires to pilots to math students.  Using these examples, he asserts that most people overlook the fortuitous timing and hard work that underlies the exceptional results.

On it’s own, this thesis isn’t new or exciting.  I know several wildly successful people who needed both good timing and hard work to make their fortunes.  And whether they made their millions on the internet, at the poker table, or on Wall Street, those people will happily admit that they needed luck and hard work.  Come to think of it, I don’t know anybody (successful or not) who doesn’t recognize the need to combine good timing with hard work in order to succeed.  In that sense, I don’t know who Gladwell is targeting.

That said, I did enjoy the book because I learned something.  Gladwell supported his argument with facts that were new to me.  I didn’t know most hockey players are born in the first few months of the year.  I didn’t know about the cultural conventions between a Korean Captain and First Officer.  I enjoyed reading statistics on the disparate effect summer vacation has on rich and poor grade school students.  What’s better, Gladwell does a good job of linking all of his examples together.  The story flows.

I think Gladwell’s argument works best in the broad cases of hockey players or math students.  It’s overly simplistic when applied to successful individuals like Bill Joy.  Sure, Bill Joy was born at the right time and worked tirelessly.  If he were born a few years earlier or later, he certainly wouldn’t have achieved the same success.  Even so, Bill Joy is a special genius.  When you hear him talk or see his work, you know there’s no way to hold him back.  He possesses a special mind perfectly tuned for his time and place in history.  I wish Gladwell gave such special individual talent more credance.

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