Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory

There is an article today in the New York times that talks about using GAs and neural nets to pick stocks (here).  This is fairly old hat to readers of this blog, but it is interesting that Ray Kurzweil is beating this drum:

“Artificial intelligence is becoming so deeply integrated into our economic ecostructure that some day computers will exceed human intelligence,” Mr. Kurzweil tells a room of investors who oversee enormous pools of capital. “Machines can observe billions of market transactions to see patterns we could never see.”

Kurzweil is a provocative, influential fellow, and perhaps these comments will loosen up the traditionalists in the financial engineering community who think that the future is built on a base of relatively inflexible operations research.