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Comment by Symmetry | Hacker News Reader

Now that this has happened once and people noticed it I bet there are going to be a bunch of bots looking to arbitrage off of other overly-literal bots next April 1st.

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I was just thinking that. You'd only have to beat out all the overly-literal bots on a single day, so I'd imagine the complexity of the problem is dramatically reduced. I think ideally you would train a bot to recognize some measure of satire/joking, yet you would only want to execute on the press releases/articles that were just on the very edge of satire, so as to detect satire that fools as many general purpose bots as possible, as fast as possible. I doubt there is really that much of this happening, relative to the size of the market, though.

This satire alone created a $100 million bump. It makes sense now that in Feb to do a skunkworks satire/parody engine that runs on April 1st and compares against the other high frequency trading bots that aren't equipped to handle nuance.

Hm. Maybe I can arbitrage off of the bot that arbitrages off of the overly-literal bots.

I was thinking along these lines the other day. Maybe stock market is unpredictable without outside world insight, but algorithms probably are.

A second order predictor may benefit from it, giving less gains more reliably guessing algorithm behavior instead of stock trends.

You make the bot that fools all the other bots. I'll make the bot that fools your bot.

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