You mean, you would have been able to come up with google's optimization (which one would that be exactly?) or with any classic algorithm, without understanding the problem? I think you're merely benefiting from other people's understanding of these problems.

My DNA came from a billion year run on a gigantic parallel processing farm (you know, all organisms on the earth ever). I'm still puzzling on how to interpret this run's output however. I don't even know what problem needed to be solved in the first place.

To think that because the tax system is so complicated, a more simpler solution must exist without any by-effects seems to be inspired by a religious belief in technology as a solution to anything we can't figure out by ourselves. This belief is the product of not really understanding then nature of technology: to be able to solve a problem, one needs to understand it first.

Let's apply the same principle to exchange rates (let's use a computer to determine the exchange rates between currencies, those computers are so smart), democracy itself (no more need for arguments or elections), the distribution of rewards, making consumptive choices... I haven't read anything by David Brin, but I would expect him to specialize in fantasies about dystopian societies where a skynet-like system controls the fate of humanity.

To be more exact, there is no easy formula of the hypergeometric kind, which is a formula "involving binomial coefficients, factorials, rational functions, and power functions" according to http://mathworld.wolfram.com/HypergeometricIdentity.html. It would thus theoretically still be possible that an easy formula exists, but it must involve constructions more exotic than that.

When pricing options the bionomial way, one creates a sort of decision tree for movements the underlying value makes. (scroll down on http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/high-performance-computing-with-binomial-option-pricing-part-1/ to see such a tree).

This paper seems to prove that there is no easy formula short cut for the tree: if one wants to know the answer, one really needs to build the entire tree.

I would assume Firefox handles its MHTML itself?

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How about the tools to obtain those necessities? How about the tools to create these aforementioned tools? How about some entertainment in between your valiant efforts to obtain the necessities and create the tools?

The point you seem to be making is that "things on paper" like contracts and securities only have value insofar they are credibly enforced. This has no bearing however on the notion that gold has no intrinsic value, whereas, say, an apple production plant has.

...when Judit was 12, with just Judit with a blindfold, 10-0 in a 10 game match.

Judit Polgar is the best femal chess player in history, by a long margin. Let's stop the propagation of this nonsensical news.

It's not about decisions but about information (did I tell you I'm a mathematician working in the industry?)

Marginal information has a marginal influence on human decision making, and thus its providers should be allowed to charge a marginal fee for it. The point you should be making is that this fee is too large, not that it is there in the first place.

BTW, perhaps you should provide more information regarding the exact mechanism of your delay mechanism. I do not see how it is going to prevent arbitrage at all: is all trade information delayed? then all arbitrage will take place at a delay, with similar profits.

Market participants will also invest in acquiring superior information as long as this process is profitable. There are other ways to acquire price information than from the exchange (for instance by collecting information from a sample of the traders themselves, at a charge). Non-arbitrageurs will not invest the resources to beat your delay, whereas arbitrageurs will. Therefore I expect the extra hurdle for the retrieval of information to benefit the arbitrageur.

First of all, you're not talking about HFT really, but about arbitrage: making use of inefficiencies in the dissemination of information in a market. Arbitrage is as old as trading itself and now that trading happens with fast computers, the same goes for arbitrage. If some knowledge becomes available in some place, it will quickly spread over the entire market. In this process, the arbitrageur plays an important role: the parties that profit from trading are the parties that actually spread the information: if you buy/sell an instrument because it's under/over priced, you actually help to in/decrease its price. The fact that arbitrage rakes up big profits only means that the trading system is efficient. You should thus work to make it more efficient instead of killing the arbitrageur.

The solutions you propose are exactly symptom killers:
1. Adding a delay means you're withholding information from the markets. With less information, market participants make decisions that are less informed and thus poorer.
2. Adding a tax has actually the same result: if you raise a tax, you're actually putting a threshold on the level of information that can be disseminated with a profit. This will in effect mean that new information will only be sent once it reaches a certain level of impact and the tax thus functions as a delay for this information.

Why don't you propose a more open economy, where information is easier to get by and cheaper. This will automatically result in better prices (one of the important functions of financial markets: knowing what something is comparatively worth) and it will reduce the profits of the arbitrageurs.

Ofcourse I haven't read the article. The summary provides enough information: 1. The subject is arbitrage, not trading. The impact of the ideas summarized here on trading is negligable. For actual trading, latency is a much less important issue. 2. Arbitrage makes money by exploiting (and thereby reducing) inefficiencies. 3. The profits made by arbitrageurs should go down to reasonable levels, under the assumption that markets are efficient 4. The fact that arbitrageurs are still making enormous profits shows that we have much more serious issues in our financial system than the lag between exchanges