That is a bit poetic. In the Fibonacci case, we know that there is a simple explanation/formula. For the stock market, genome, or Shakespeare, it is not obvious that the smallest circuit will provide any significant understanding. On the other hand, if there's any regularity at all in the stock market, the shortest efficient description will take advantage of this regularity for compression. And, therefore, you could use this automatically discovered regularity for prediction as well.
On the other hand, if several traders get their hands on efficient NP computers at once, it's safe to bet that historical regularities will go out the window.
it's safe to bet that historical regularities will go out the window.
Pun intended?
Many experts suspect that there is no polynomial-time solution to the so-called NP-complete problems, though no-one has yet been able to rigorously prove this and there remains the possibility that a polynomial-time algorithm will one day emerge. However unlikely this is, today I would like to invite LW to play a game I played with with some colleagues called what-would-you-do-with-a-polynomial-time-solution-to-3SAT? 3SAT is, of course, one of the most famous of the NP-complete problems and a solution to 3SAT would also constitute a solution to *all* the problems in NP. This includes lots of fun planning problems (e.g. travelling salesman) as well as the problem of performing exact inference in (general) Bayesian networks. What's the most fun you could have?