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Strategies & Market Trends : Neural Nets - A tool for the 90's -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Carl R. who wrote (305)	11/26/1998 10:00:00 AM
From: Patrick Slevin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 871

I'm not as technically oriented as you are, I'm not quite certain what a BP model is and can only guess that the PII-450 is a faster chip.. Chips are incredibly cheap, by the way. My 15 year-old used some of money from caddying and bought a "build-it-wourself" machine specifying an AMD 333 chip. They ended up building it for him and the entire thing was around $650. Then he sprang for 15 more at a local electronics shop for the keyboard and he was done. I have not had any of the 3 versions lock up on me, I can say that. Much of my problems appear to be related to loading data. I think I solved my problem from yesterday by running a set of data provider programs to rebuild the files. I imagine you don't have this problem because you are loading the data yourself, but since I started using Pinnacle it's been a bit hairy. Pinnacle saves data in 12 folders so the path from Profit goes to one only. I'm not quite certain what to do with this; go back 11 times plus a 12th for the Reuters data? Oddly, BioComp Tech Support does not know if the data can be packed into one folder or not. I imagine there is something I can do with DPACKER (from Pinnacle) but the effort that goes into loading the data should not be more onerous than creating systems. I can appreciate the problems with mis-typing. I have to run it on a notebook and the keyboard is less than friendly. Because Profit is a single station program I cannot create the systems on a normal size machine and port it over to the notebook. I strongly believe that much of my problems stem from the fact that Profit and NGO were built by a person who is interested in optimization models, a certain type of Industrial Engineering technique applied with a Computer Science background. The programs were developed really to conquer problems like traffic flow and the like. The Profit model is more of a sales aid, as they can say that if the NGO can model financial markets then it model just about anything. No argument there; just that it's a system developed by Computer Scientists for people who can quickly grasp the nuances. Someone who trades for a living has to be hard-pressed to get answers. Simple issues like importing data should not be a roadblock. Yet even for their Tech Support person the solution to problems like this are knotty. So the issue I am having a problem with is that it's the old story of a programmer seeing it from the way the program is built and the user more interested in the results. It boils down to communication. They think it's clear and I think it's as clear as mud.