Human vs the Fruit Fly #12
Box the chart pattern closer than a real fruit fly’s brain.
Round 1 of 5: box the Ascending Triangle
Drag across the chart to box it.
Daily bars, split-adjusted, from scanr.ai. Each pattern was flagged by scanr’s detector, then confirmed and marked by a person on our team. The fly’s guesses were worked out ahead of time by running its circuit over each chart. Not financial advice.
How to play
- Each day you get 5 real stock charts, six months of daily candles each, with the name and dates hidden. Every chart holds a pattern, and we tell you which one.
- Drag across the chart to box the pattern, then lock it in. Your box scores by how much it overlaps the real one.
- A fruit fly sniffs the same chart and boxes its own guess. The closer box wins the round, and finding the pattern before the fly lands is worth 25 bonus points.
- After each round you see the pattern, the stock and the fly’s guess. New charts every day at midnight ET.
Who is the fly?
In September, Janelia and Google published the wiring diagram of a whole fruit fly nervous system. We took its smell circuit, 155 input neurons wired to 1,912 Kenyon cells, and asked it to find chart patterns. It barely beat a coin flip.
Here it plays fair. At each spot on the chart it smells the 128 trading days ending there, the shape of window it learned from, and compares the smell with the charts our team accepted or rejected as that pattern, leaving out every chart of the same stock. It boxes the spot that smells most like the pattern, and it never sees a day after the chart ends. The amber strip under the chart is its nose at work.
Read the experiment: we asked a fruit fly’s brain to find chart patterns