On casey's recommendation I read Michael Crichton's Prey on Saturday. It was very good! I find it funny that I should read this book after watching the optionScalper's GA demo on Wednesday. There are a few interesting points about this book: (1) The whole thing reads like a movie screenplay. You can picture every scene in your head. (2) I was amazed how much research Crichton had done on this book, as is evident from the 5 page bilbliography. (3) I thought his use of multi-agent distributed computing, emergent behavior, and nanotech was very well done and not cheesy.

All this has peaked my interest in AI again. I had been interested in neural nets back in the early 90's and wrote a predictive stock market app for fun. I'm thinking it's time to explore this technology again.