Thanks for your views on using AI, but I should point out that I'm not going to do some fancy price predictions, or even trading predictions (at least not yet).
Normally I use tape reading and some classical technical indicators along with a lot of news reading/watching and trying to get a "sense" of the mood in the market by watching reactions to trades happening and technical indicators (which seldom seem to be a firm guidance with the highly volatile ES futures).
When I trade, I get some kind of "pattern" or signal for my trading, I guess, and I also witness trades which happen so fast in reaction to signals/other trades that they have to be automated. It's also a fact that many try to use automated trading - probably with varying success.
I have some background in using rules-based and fuzzy logic from the mid 1980's, and then some NNs with genetic algorithms from 1996 onwards (but for accurately predicting hourly changes 24h ahead for energy markets [my models did that at over 90% success-rate too - around +80% yearly average - that was actual predictions] and other data mining projects).
The "holy grail" as we all know would be having some super-AI system being able to do all kinds of intraday markets; but in my view such a system would encourage changes/adaptation to these kinds of systems in the markets where market players would try to distort signals on purpose to skew markets into their favor. This is the case nowadays as well to some extent.
What I'm looking for is patterns that I use nowadays, and perhaps trying to find some new patterns for me to trade on. Then if I trust a automated system which could use a mix of proprietary generated indicators, I would be willing to try it - after some serious testing.
However, the markets are constantly in flux, so there will always be a need to adapt the models and indicators that used to work, probably don't any more. That's evolution, and I think I'll handle that manually.
So, as long as you understand what I'm trying to do, and what I'm not trying to do, I think trying to identify patterns that are currently working in the markets is not such a futile idea/project. I use my good eye to watch the tape and the other to scan for other news.
Well, I just came back from the beach, and have go out eat some sushi now. I'll answer more about Kohonen Self-Organizing Maps etc. later, and also why I'm interested in HMM and Bayesians (which are not normally good for generalizing - but that's ok in my case I guess).
Still, if anyone are actually using some AI techniques - either standard or proprietary - I'm still interested in hearing about it. I know most of the pitfalls about AI, since I've been pursuing this interest for some time, and have some successes with applying it.
AI also works for things like speech-recognition, NLS and other pattern recognition cases, I'm just not looking for the straightforward patterns in price, volume etc.