Goldman Sach's MAS

There is a theory among, presumably bitter, AI researchers that a technology is called AI until it works and then it gets called something else. Voice recognition, OCR, face recognition in digital cameras are examples of this. Goldman Sach's intelligent, distributed trading platform seems to be continuing the tradition for MAS. From what I can glean from the various newspaper articles, they have a bunch of agents that monitor trading flows and autonomously and very quickly place trades to exploit market conditions.

http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/07/04/taibbi-nyse-ends-transparency-to-protect-goldman-sachs/

http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/07/guest-post-manipulation.html

I think people overlook how MAS and MRS can process so much information, collected from a very large number of sources and make so many decisions so quickly. Humans simply can't compete. The above stories hint that this might be the case here. Assuming what Goldman is doing is legal (I have no idea), then their advantage is due to a reasonably simple MAS that can simply process more information and make more decisions faster than any human can.

I suspect that we will have to get used to this type of thing happening. It won't be just in markets, it may be in many different areas.