Data designer Shing Tat Chung has embarked on a strange project to create a superstitious robot who makes stock market investments. Sponsored in part by Microsoft Research, as well as GDP Capital, the project is intended to reveal what patterns emerge when an entity invests based on astrological and numerological information. Click the image above to see Chung's initial proposal. Yes, it's too late for you to invest — but that's the fun part. Now the experiment is underway.


Chung writes:

The Superstitious Fund Project is a live one year experiment where an uncanny algorithm or SUPERSTITIOUS AUTOMATED ROBOT will trade live on the stock market. The financial instruments it will be using will be spreadbetting on the FTSE 100. The superstitious trading algorithm will trade purely on the belief of NUMEROLOGY and in accordance to the MOON. It will for example have the fear of the number 13, as well as generating its own beliefs and new logic for trading.


Not surprisingly, in the first two months, the fund lost money. Also, Chung has already started to see patterns in how the robot's investments evolve over time as it gets more superstitious data. You can read more about how the fund works, and what Chung has found so far, in this excellent, in-depth report on BBC.