A fun modern way to trade: math trades | Hacker News Reader

A fun modern way to trade: math trades

boardgamegeek.com

7 pointsTichy7 comments

These are not new, but I have liked the idea ever since I encountered it, and I have not seen it mentioned on news.yc before. So far I have only seen it on boardgamegeek, although I think there is independent software for conducting such trades (so people outside of boardgemgeek seem to know and care about it).

What I like about it: it might be a more optimal form of trade, that has only become feasible with the access to adequate computing power (100 years ago, there wasn't an option to trade like this - I think calculating the optimal trade is a NP complete problem. Haven't checked this now, though).

And furthermore, it is simply fun: it adds an element of suspense and excitement to the trade, while you can still be sure to not be screwed over.

I was inspired to post this because of the "auctions" in the YC list... A part of me wanted to remain quiet, but we'll see ;-)

>I think calculating the optimal trade is a NP complete problem. Haven't checked this now, though

If you define the optimal trade as the trade involving as many people as possible, then the problem is NP-complete (it solves DIRECTED HAMILTONIAN CIRCUIT). There are good heuristics for solving this problem, though, so in most cases it won't matter.

I think the optimal trade would make most people happy, but ultimately it is hard to decide upon the best criterion? I remember that they use heuristics, or in any case they usually don't compute the best solution, just a reasonably good one.

There's a new startup, BarterQuest (http://www.barterquest.com/), that aims to do the same sort of math trades, craigslist-style.

Sounds like a really neat idea if you could get enough people involved...

Interesting, but too bad that you can't even browse the items without signing up. Hopefully that is only because it is still beta (I didn't sign up).

Hey Tichy,

I'm a developer at BarterQuest, and I stumbled upon this post from you recently. I wanted to try and clarify some of the things mentioned in this post and in your comments.

During our Invitation-Only Beta Testing period, we are requiring users to sign up to do most activities on our site. This is mostly due to the fact that we want to measure how our site performs with signed-up users who will have access to all of our sites features.

As it relates to the article linked here, BarterQuest has a patented Matching Engine, which depending on what you have to trade and what you want to trade it for, among other things like specific attributes for your item, it will calculate the best matches for you, so you won't have to be searching all over the site for that item you're looking for. Of course, you'll be able to do that too, but we're confident our Matching Engine will be able to do the job for you. Right now since we're still in testing, the match results won't be plentiful, but as time goes on and we roll out of Beta testing and more users post more items, it'll be relatively easy to get accurate matches.

I encourage you (and to sign up during this testing period. Right now the site is totally free of cost, and if you're able to complete a successful trade during the testing period, you'll get free trading for an entire year. We also have some additional bonuses for signed-up users as well, which will be announced in our blog (http://blog.barterquest.com) soon.

We hope to see you there!

isnt this what swaptree.com does?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com