>I agree with you, for raw calculations a computer
>beats the human brain. But for pattern recognition
>the human brain is still number one.
That is another blanket statement that is provably incorrect with thousands of real world examples (the first and most obvious one is simple OCR). First, it is incredibly difficult to separate "raw calculations" from "pattern recognition" since the first is required for the second.
I'll give you a perfect example of a pattern recognition problem that the human brain would be useless in solving but has recently been solved quite easily through computers -- I was involved in the development of the yellow first down line that is used on many football broadcasts. The system that delivers this line to viewers is chock full of computerized pattern recognition solutions that the human mind is worthless for.
For reasons I won't go into here, we need to know which of the numerous cameras at the event has been selected by the director to be "live" to the audience at any given moment - this is known in the business to be the camera that is "tallied". Now, how can we know this with certainty? -- all the raw camera feeds and the output (network) feed are run though our computer and by comparing all these feeds (pattern recognition) 60 times per second the computer can determine which camera the director has tallied. Now, let's put the best human brain available on this pattern recognition task and have it watch all the raw screens and the output screen and have it try to tell us within a 60th of a second when the director changes cameras and the identity of the selected camera -- simply can't be done. And btw, the described problem is the *simple* one in the system -- try having the human brain recognize all the colors in each frame and determine which patterns to "paint" yellow (grass, mud, turf, etc) and which patterns not to paint (jerseys, flesh, shoes, helmets, balls).
The human mind is an amazing piece of work. Something simple to our minds such as vision may be lifetimes away to a computer. Trading is nothing like vision IMO.
JB