Monday 31 January 2011

31/1/2011

# Fixed the following bugs:

1) Sellers and buyers were using different distributions for generating asks/bids. Buyers were using normal distribution, while sellers were using a bimodal distribution. Now, both use normal distribution

2) Prevent sellers from bidding in auctions when there are no buyers present.

3) last_transaction is now set to None, at the beginning of a new trading round, rather than the end of the last trading round. This prevents buyers from getting a Null object while reformulating their bids. Behaviour seen since objects are not copied, objects are passed-by-value (python's consenting adults philosophy)

Not enough PROGRESS!! Some apps don't appear in the logs at all now. Very frustrating.

# Created a set of reading notes for MSc. student
# Created and delivered tutorial for tutees
# No response from James on algorithm. Perhaps I should wait for a couple of days and ping him.

Friday 28 January 2011

the daily grind - 28/1/2011

Tried to figure out why buyers who weren't able to trade successfully, continued to be unsuccessful, even when successful buyers dropped out of the market.

Found bugs:
1) If no transaction happened, then modelling the buyer's next bid on the market's last transaction results in an empty bid

2) The sellers from previous successful transactions, drop out of the market, while the buyer's don't. This is the exact opposite of what we want.


Emailed James about help with describing the algorithm formally and doing some analysis (maybe probabilistic or game theoretic). Obviously, he won't read my paper immediately, but any critical response from him, over the next week, would be good.