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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Freedom Fighter who wrote (60891)	5/27/1999 12:25:00 PM
From: Tommaso	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

I didn't realize that you and Mike had already responded on this issue. Some years ago I taught myself enough LISP to write programs in it; at that time it was touted as the language of artifical intelligence. I constructed a program into which one could enter all sorts of data: interest rates, long and short term; the money supply figures; inflation rate; stock prices; the price of gold; and several other things. Then I would try changing one of the variables to see what happened. The results were inconsistent and unpredictable. It was useless in predicting anything because what came out was never the same. At the time, I thought there was something wrong with my program, but now I believe that it proved that making economic predictions is useless because there are too many variables that do not fluctuate in a regular way. What you can do is look at something and make some kind of guess as to whether it is worth the price people are paying for it. You may be wrong there, too, but statistical measures over longer periods of time help a little.