7.13. Notes
[] One of those numerical meteorology problems led to the discovery of deterministic chaos, the strong dependence of a result on what was presumed to be meaninglessly small differences in the inputs. This was popularized as the so-called butterfly effect, since the seemingly insignificant pressure changes caused by a fluttering butterfly, well within the limits of error of barometers used to measure them, could result in wildly different simulated future weather and climate outcomes. James Gleick's book, Chaos (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), is the place to start for the story of chaos.
[] Garbage collection is just gathering up blocks of memory no longer needed by the program. It is part of most implementations of the LISP language. It is very useful to programmers, who then don't have to keep track of memory themselves. It is obviously not a good idea to use in a real-time application like trading unless it can be accomplished without stopping.
[] LISP is a computer language particularly suited to manipulation of symbols (as opposed to numbers). It is widely used in the academic AI community. LISP machines are workstations with specialized hardware to run LISP programs efficiently.
[] First described in "Knowledge-Based Systems for Financial Applications," D. Leinweber, IEEE Expert (Fall 1988).
[] The names "Gensym" and "G2" are subtle LISP jokes. LISP and other AI programming languages sometimes need to create variables, which need names. Gensym is the ...
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