An artist who trained rats to trade in foreign-exchange markets (2014) | Hacker News Reader

An artist who trained rats to trade in foreign-exchange markets (2014)

theatlantic.com

247 pointsdoener119 comments

Brilliant.

The artist's website[a] described the program perfectly using the soul-crushing jargon of corporate bureaucracy:

> Our program is a professional service to the financial industry; rats are being trained to become superior traders in the financial markets. Using our own methodology in accordance with well-established animal training techniques, our subjects learn to recognize pattens in historical stock and futures data as well as generating trading signals. We provide solutions for tick based trading data and day based data. RATTRADERS rats can be trained exclusively for any financial market segment. They outperform most human traders and represent a much more economic solution for your trading desk.

Left unsaid is that many human traders are subjected to similar Pavlovian "training" -- and are treated with about as much kindness and dignity as those rats.

---

[a] https://web.archive.org/web/20150111121618/http://www.rattra...

Feels positively factual and hype-free compared with your average AI recommendation startup...

It’s a rat race out there…

> Left unsaid is that many human traders are subjected to similar Pavlovian "training" -- and are treated with about as much kindness and dignity as those rats.

Is this art a statement about how poorly society treats the financial services industry?

Its a statement on how to deal with the limited intelligence of a rat and give it a sense of dignity and purpose.

”Society” does not treat financial ”services” in any particular way.

The owner class just treats their hackers of the financial system just as bad as they treat any other workers.

The owner class treats their hackers of the financial system far better than they treat the truckers and warehouse stockers of the logistics system.

And it's hilarious that those people seldom talk about "class". The working class is almost entirely outside that kind of politics.

The hackers are really the poor and oppressed underclass of our age is something I didn't think I'd ever hear.

Delusions of revolution are really an upper-middle class/failed elite phenomenon.

I'll never forget how James Mickens describes hackers in This World Of Ours: "vaguely Marxist but comfortably bourgeoisie."

BF Skinner legit trained pigeons to work in manufacturing assembly lines at hight of his popularity. I think it was maybe part QA at auto plants.

I seem to recall program was cancelled only because it was very demotivating for the humans also working on the line.

IIRC it (or was it another assembly line using pigeons) was stopped because it was considered cruel to get them to perform such work.

OK for humans though, apparently!

Humans can consent.

Consent or starve

We can choose what jobs we work and find new ones unlike these pigeons.

I think you're missing the point about needing to work in order to survive.

Yes, but a person can still choose which job to work in order to optimize their happiness, trading off compensation with the work's enjoyment. A person can also invest in themselves and develop new skills to unlock additional types of jobs, etc.

This is geographically variable: the more rural you are, the less choice you have. And between comparable geography, there's a lot of variation. It's not just job, it's profession. To get an OK nursing or teaching job, you may need to move across counties or even states. You can invest in yourself if you have capital.

You can invest in yourself if you have a library card. You can invest in yourself if you have internet.

Yes, some people might have to move to get a job, but living somewhere isn’t a right, at least in my mind. There’s emotional and sentimental reasons to live where one currently does and it would be “painful” to live somewhere else, but is doable.

Sure. Optimizing for happiness doesn't mean you end up happy.

Are you suggesting that everybody has the choice to study through library books and get a more fulfilling job? Everyone has the aptitude for book learning? So all those people stuck in dead end jobs in a factory (that could be done by a pigeon) are choosing not to learn CS and earn $mega at FAANG? That rather undermines the meritocracy cult of SV doesn't it, if anyone could do it?

The merit concept - true or not - is that it takes extra work to both survive and study enough to earn $mega at FAANG. The work is what earns the merit.

You're arguing that it's not hard work that gets people good jobs; that the people stuck in dead end factory jobs could never work hard enough to earn $mega. Right?

I usually hear this argument being presented as one where factory worker was not given equal opportunities and/or that FAANG worker didn't earn their position. I'm not sure if you're saying that, or that the people doing pigeon jobs are naturally incapable of doing anything else, but both of those ideas sure take all the agency away from individuals.

It rings especially hollow to me as someone who didn't go to college, and taught myself to code, and makes $x per hour, and knows a lot of people (including my partner and her friends) who did go to college, who work in a factory and make 0.2*$x. While the sour grapes element and the jealousy (or covetousness mixed with some bafflement) is always there under the surface, I find it so petty. I have a hard time understanding it. If you want my job, go download a free IDE and start spending all night making stuff for 10 years while doing your day job. I did it while driving a taxi and waiting tables for minimum wage.

I think a lot of people could do it. The fact that they could, and don't, is exactly the basis for the sense of earned merit for those who do. Hot tip: Skip the marriage and kids till you get where you want to be financially. But if you do want to prioritize having a family, don't then be jealous of those who prioritized their career.

Don't pigeons have to work to eat also? Unless food is just dropped into their nest each day there is no escaping the rat race, no creature is excluded.

People don’t always seem to be happy that humans created money to facilitate this process

There's an alternative to making money, which is stealing it. Just like some birds steal other birds' nests (presumably because they're unhappy that someone has amassed a larger collection of twigs).

Let’s rob a bank together

I find many in the tech space and especially in the business space struggle (with disturbing difficulty) with the idea of meaningful truely freely given consent. GDPR uses a mostly adequate definition[0]; with examples added:

1. Freely-given without penalty: Services cannot force you to accept by refusing or degrading service. Consent must be truly voluntary, a streaming platform that won’t let you sign up or only allows you to watch up to 1080p unless you share your data with ad partners, is illegal.

2. Allowed to change your mind after you've previously consented: Withdrawing consent must be as easy as giving it. If one click gave consent, a single click must remove it. Bullying by requiring you to mail a letter, call a phone number, or navigate endless menus is illegal under GDPR.

3. The company must show clear evidence that you were informed and knowingly agreed: For example, they can’t rely on a tiny pre-checked box hidden under layers of ToS or on vague "by using this service, you agree" language. Doing so is illegal. Even pre-ticking the agree box is illegal, the user must make an active choice.

4. Consent requests must use plain language and stand apart from the rest of the text: A single, prominent and clearly labeled statement "Do you agree to share your data with these marketing partners?" suffices. Burying it in 5 pages of legalese does not and is illegal.

5. Any part of a consent request that violates GDPR is itself automatically void: If part of the contract claims the company can ignore any future withdrawal, that part is invalid and illegal.

[0] https://gdpr.eu/article-7-how-to-get-consent-to-collect-pers...

Thank you.

They literally employed monkeys as railway signalmen in 19th century

Yes fun story, Jack was an assistant signalman and got paid for the job, partially in beer! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_(baboon)

> James "Jumper" Wide had been known for jumping between railcars until an accident where he fell and lost both of his legs at the knee

Incredible

On a darker note, he also tried to use pigeons to help guide bombs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

See-also: "The Feeling of Power" (1958) a short story by Isaac Asmiov, which is... related.

https://archive.org/details/1958-02_IF/page/4/mode/1up

at least it could be argued that FOREX traders actually provide something of value because they provide liquidity for businesses to trade internationally and people to carry their wealth between different nations.

I struggle to see the value of publicly traded companies, and even more so options and other "exotic vehicles" other than enticing people to gamble and make some lucky few people rich. I see the corporatization of businesses as harmful to almost everybody, including investors who are lied to or denied profits from the companies their shares control (but mainly to the working class, for humanitarian reasons).

Even capital intensive industries could just borrow money from investors, which would bring everything back to reality. build the oil rig, or you go into default, thats it. no trickery, no growth promises or "pivoting". If you don't make money you go out of business. I don't see any need for shareholders.

I think what you don't see is that the shareholders are in large part pension funds and people saving for retirement. In the absence of a wildly higher-tax government pension system, which as many other countries have demonstrated, come with just as much risk, there isn't a plausible way that I can save for retirement without holding stocks. Plus I get to pick stocks instead of just hoping the government knows what it's doing with my pension dollars.

Those investors would be buying shares in the company in all but name.

FOREX volume is almost 10% of annual global GDP _per day_.

This trading is overwhelmingly unrelated to trade in goods or services, or the movement of wealth with much permanence.

thats fine, I dont think the amount should be regulated to match the good it provides. I just claim that it provides some good for the world, whereas equities does not.

Cool, so speculators are just providing shitloads of liquidity to people trading in goods and services. As an importer/exporter, I love that FX is so liquid, cheap, and easy today.

> at least it could be argued that FOREX traders actually provide something of value because they provide liquidity [...] I struggle to see the value of publicly traded companies

Seeing this A>B comparison made me stop and re-check whether it was the introduction to a satirical post.

Many of those companies are actually doing something transformative in the world like growing food or inventing better mousetraps. That's way more "value" than "providing liquidity", regardless of whatever debates we might have about who ends up with the rewards.

> Even capital intensive industries could just borrow money from investors

Does that mean using shares as collateral for a cash-loan, versus selling shares outright?

I believe the op wasn't arguing that companies themselves aren't valuable, just the public speculation markets.

I never said the companies shouldn't exist. Try reading what I said more carefully since you also misclassified it as satire.

Mate, what on Earth are you talking about? "Even capital intensive industries could just borrow money from investors" > What do you think publicly traded companies are?

The most-charitable interpretation I can think of is that the company never sells shares outright (preventing speculation on their value) but only uses them as collateral when borrowing cash from a lender... But that raises questions about why the lender would agree:

* If there's no competitive market to sell them on, how does the lender recoup its losses by selling the shares?

* If the company is in such a bad place that it can't repay the cash loan, why would the shares retain any value?

* Even if the shares entitle you to some portion of the capital that was purchased with the missing cash (e.g. a mine and mining machines) then getting your cash back means you have to work fighting against other shareholders who might not want to liquidate anything.

The Navy's Marine Mammal Program advertises quite an interesting array of mine detection techniques using Dophins. If this is what they publicly share, who knows what they're training animals to do in secret.

https://www.niwcpacific.navy.mil/About/Departments/Intellige...

Nah, that description is readable. It's not soul crushing if you can read it and walk away with a clear understanding what the project does.

> Left unsaid is that many human traders are subjected to similar Pavlovian "training" -- and are treated with about as much kindness and dignity as those rats.

I think it's pretty clear from subtext that that is the core thrust of the work. ;-)

> Brilliant.

Is it though?

Doing unconventional shit with animals: it's obscenity. People have been litigating the difference between ordinary obscenity and shock art forever. This is an easy call for me.

You can slap a "message" on obscene things and it's a perfectly valid way of making art, but I don't think it's brilliant.

This seems like a great opportunity to share this amusing dialogue from Cosmopolis, a Don DeLillo book and its film adaptation by David Cronenberg:

"There's a poem I read in which a rat becomes the unit of currency."

"Yes. That would be interesting," Chin said.

"Yes. That would impact the world economy."

"The name alone. Better than the dong or the kwacha."

"The name says everything."

"Yes. The rat," Chin said.

"Yes. The rat closed lower today against the euro."

"Yes. There is growing concern that the Russian rat will be devalued."

"White rats. Think about that."

"Yes. Pregnant rats."

"Yes. Major sell-off of pregnant Russian rats."

"Britain converts to the rat," Chin said.

"Yes. Joins trend to universal currency."

"Yes. U.S. establishes rat standard."

"Yes. Every U.S. dollar redeemable for rat."

"Dead rats."

"Yes. Stockpiling of dead rats called global health menace.*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyaA3rWWHHs

Yes. Ratcoin virtual rats spike to new high after dead rats cause health menace.

Yes. The ratchain.

I'd like one strawberry tart without so much rat in it.

Yes. Infest the rats' nest.

Yes. all hail King Gizzard

Since learning that pigeons can compete with radiologists in terms of accuracy for mammography screenings [1], I'm willing to believe almost anything. Turns out neural nets really are pretty good at pattern matching/function approximation!

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34878151

The woman who can smell parkinsons, also fascinating: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/magazine/parkinsons-smell...

Thank you, I read about this story years ago, but this is a fuller telling of the story.

So much promise but I had not heard of any updates on progress on either Parkinson’s detection, or the identification of the metabolites that make the smell.

This in turn raises another question about the acute sense of smell, is this like the people who have four cones in the eye and so can see a whole set of colours?

I think this genetic mutation only occurs in women, I guess the genetics of olfaction are a lot more complicated.

Should photos be taken to accommodate for these four sets of cone colours, adding a new level for RGB? Very few people can see it, but there’s surely a demand.

My understanding of tetrachromacy is that it's duplicates the red cones, and shifts their sensitivity a very tiny amount - the suspicion is that it doesn't meaningfully change subjective color perception at all, and at best makes tetrachromats very slightly better at distinguishing shades of red that would appear identical to us regular trichromats.

It would be very exciting if some humans had a mutation that let them be sensitive to something further than our standard three!

There's also a podcast episode with her that I really enjoyed: https://www.npr.org/2020/03/23/820009335/invisibilia-an-unli...

It's a whole scientific field:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=no&as_sdt=7%2C39&q=odo...

(There was a footnote in Seeing like a State about some doctor with an apprentice approaching a house and saying "smell this, this is the smell of [some infectious disease]")

Can we train pigeons to spot spam?

In my experience they've trained themselves to spot most kinds of food very efficiently, but false positives, combined with a lack of object permanence, remain a concern.

They have, i was eating subway was once. Had a huge seagull right next to be staring into my soul, which is polite as far as seagulls go. So i took a piece of lettuce out of the sandwich and threw it to him.

Just stared at me, he knew there was meat and he wasn't taking anything less.

I wonder if a well trained rat can beat an AI in terms of prediction quality per energy spent.

"Buy a bunch of H200s and build a SMR next to the data center? Nah, just take these rats and feed them for 3 years."

Seems like pulling punches to call this art or a joke. If we can simplify the UX on a technology that creates value to where animals can use it, that's an amazing technology.

It's likely that we can use AI (not necessary tho) to interpret human interfaces to find and create symbolic games with analogous dynamics that can be "played" or managed by animals.

doing this for FX is a great insight as that market is relatively pure or efficient from an information perspective. Rats are interesting, but building this for crows could be a game changer. Avian arbitrage.

If we did it with male cows, it would be quite literally a “bull-market”.

pulling punches? not sure you’re using that idiom correctly, “selling it short” would match better

on the idiom, pulling punches means not following through on a criticism, like saying "hah, only joking!" or, "don't challenge me it's just art!", where selling it short means describing it as less than it could be. They're related, but no, I did not misuse an idiom. however, for people whose first language isn't english I could accept the idiom is a bit opaque for a public forum.

i’m a native english speaker. the reason your usage is incorrect is because what you are saying is they didn’t sufficiently recognize the ‘amazing’ potential of these ideas, the exact opposite of the criticism implied by pulling punches.

ask chatgpt or something to arbitrate, i’m confident it would agree with me

what the artist created was technology that automates traders, and calling it mere art or commentary is pulling the punch on the challenge this poses to actual traders. consider reading more literature and even writing for edited publications before commenting on idiom usage again.

you can lead a horse to water… [0]

0: https://chatgpt.com/share/67648482-c67c-8010-9752-9377a5c51e...

Both your and the other person's phrases are correct, but depending on what they're applied to. Calling it a joke or art pulls the punch on traders doing the same thing and feeling good about their trading skills, while calling it just art also sells the technology short as far as its capabilities go.

>and create symbolic games with analogous dynamics that can be "played" or managed by animals.

Would make for some interesting online games if some of the players or NPCs were animals.. (well looked after animals of course)

Reminds me of Mr. Goxx https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59432659

Fantastic

What a commentary on the traders of today.

"Remember, even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat."

Now that Wall St financiers are studied (chimps, rats), we now need a study of Sili Valley VCs.

Rats-as-VCs, yes?

Not rats, vultures! Vulture Capitalists is a catchy name!

2014. They've probably all been replaced by algorathmic trading by now.

Manhattan-Project styled Big Science megaproject to fully simulate a rat brain by 2050 so that it can be trained to trade the cable ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_(foreign_exchange) ).

There must be some LLM based trading bot, no? Must be. There's AI toothbrushes for Christ's sake.

I interviewed at Two Sigma in 2018 and got the impression they were already getting very deeply into using AI. I'm sure they are using LLMs to analyze news articles, etc. I bet a high schooler has probably hooked up an LLM to a trading bot.

If you can imagine ANYTHING can be used to gain a market edge, there are probably scores of very smart people who are trying it/have tried it/have figured out it wouldn't work.

The only exceptions are if it's something so small a big firm wouldn't care much about it, or you have special knowledge of a technology that most people barely know about.

> The only exceptions are if it's something so small a big firm wouldn't care much about it

The interesting part about this is the value of "small".

True. "Small" can mean many millions of dollars.

This is quite neat. They translate market numbers into tones and the rats make selections on what they think the next tone will be. I would say it's actual speculation and not random dart throwing like the crypto trading hamster or stock picking goldfish we've seen in the recent years.

that's not the financial definition of speculation. The proper definition of speculation (by proper I mean "the only one that works; all others will be flawed") is "any investment that increases the overall risk of your portfolio". (and a hedge is "any investment that decreases the overall risk of your portfolio".)

neurons predicting the future may be hedging

Ms.Kleinworth3 had a real gift for stock picking.

It's about the time of the year for the chimps to throw darts at the wall and try their luck against wall street https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickferri/2012/12/20/any-monkey...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/rattraders-0000519-v21n12/

-- article by the artist in title

Rats can drive little cars if you give them the right brain computer interface. Rats are gangster.

Brain/computer interface? You can just give them a lever. Rats absolutely love driving: https://theconversation.com/im-a-neuroscientist-who-taught-r...

So do orangutans, actually, who can easily operate human vehicles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ_0ImDYrPY

Levers are brain computer interfaces.

I've also heard from people who worked in chemical process plants in regions where there are monkeys, that they love to turn valves, push buttons and generally imitate human operators. So they have to use lots of locks to ensure only humans can control the process.

It's been a good year on hackernews, this is I believe my 3rd occasion where i get to show off Shadow the Rat's best tricks compilation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV9z0c1hjnA

Is this your vid / your rat? This is insane. Makes me want a rat!

Nah that's shadow, the lady who trained her is known in the rat world as one of the best trainers. Mine will come when they're called, go to their cage when I tell them to, pee and poo where they are supposed to, respond to their names and some basic spin stuff, but I never bothered to get that intense with them (not enough time!)

imo rats are by far the best pet, the only annoying part I would say is, as soon as you both start to fall deeply in love with each other: they die.

What a simultaneously sad and beautiful thing to share. Thank you.

Even better, rats actually enjoy driving tiny cars (https://www.livescience.com/health/neuroscience/neuroscienti...).

Somehow I feel like a similar artistic statement but about bureaucracy and regulations wouldn't have made it to The Atlantic?

Something about RATBUREAUCRATS making CARREERRATS fills as many Suspicious Activity Report (SARs) as they can, on any individual whose head stands but a bit higher than others?

That's the problem with these things: they can be made about just anything.

Now as long as neither that artist nor The Atlantic are funded by any public fund, I've got nothing against it. People should be free to speak, perform and write about art.

Just as I should be free to make one about RATBUREAUCRATS creating mountains of regulations (and I wouldn't take any public money to do so).

rattraders.com is now a Yoga website with Lorem Ipsum text.

Found it in the Wayback machine, had to go back a few years: https://web.archive.org/web/20150111121618/http://www.rattra...

Yeah the problem is that the average rat lives for less than four years, which doesn't let them see multiple market cycles. We must selectively breed or biologically engineer longer lived rats or else we will be curve fitting for a single market regime.

Yeah, all we need is a bunch of smarter rats!8-(

It's a famous Henry Ford quote actually. "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said smarter rats."

related: Michael Reeves' I Gave My Goldfish $50,000 to Trade Stocks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USKD3vPD6ZA

"Marcovici says that they were outperforming human traders after a few months of training—a claim, though, that’d require testing more thorough than what was done here."

Yeah, that's an important hedge there at the end.

Also, I think it's cruel to train the rats with electric shocks when they get it wrong.

So while I love this as art and social commentary, the devil is still very much to be found in the details.

>I think it's cruel to train the rats with electric shocks when they get it wrong.

This stuck out to me also. I don't mind a joke but not if someone/something has to get tortured for it.

Michael Reeves did it first with his goldfish

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USKD3vPD6ZA

https://archive.is/2LLoC archive of the whole article

If it would actually work, would you use that service? Or would you feel some kind of unease?

Is this really any different than what brokerages have been doing for years?

Oh, sorry, actual rats.

We can add this to my meth fueled cyberneticly outfitted cutlass chimpanzees

See also: Marzullo, Rantze, and Gage. Stock Market Behavior Predicted by Rat Neurons. Annals of Improbable Research. Vol 12, No 4. July-August 2006. https://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume12/v12i4/rat...

(2014)

The rat race literally :)

I mean, imagine the savings in cocaine alone!

Adderrall these days:

https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/young-banker-finance-adh...

Tsk. No respect for tradition.

Overdose of anti-ADHD stimulants have possibly lethal side effects.

Date: 2014

Onecould train SWEs to trade in foreign-exchange markets, which is at a lower level,so what?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com