The Enchantress of Numbers...

There is a giant Black Hole at the center of our galaxy the BBC announced today.  What good timing.  Reading on, Dr. Massy said "Although we think of Black Holes as somehow threatening, in the sense that if you get too close to one you are in trouble, they may have had a role in helping galaxies to form - not just our own, but all galaxies"...."They had a role in bringing matter together...

Somehow all this chatter about black holes and bringing matter together brought Missmarketcrash back inside her brain again, to yesterday's mention of the enchanted Ada...

"What about a machine"?  Ada asked with a nervous quiver, one that reflected her naivety. 

"Yes - let's build a most fantastic sort of contraption with input from all types of data from all over the world" she continued breathlessly...."deriviatives trading, housing sales, lending, the equity market, management consultants, anything really".  Let's call the machine umm..."Ada's Box".  As she left the room, Missmarketplace reflected on the notion that Ada was a mathematically-inclined daughter of an Important Poet.   And this Important Poet was scandalous and beautiful on all fronts -- a reckless attitude toward money, promiscuous in all ways...the perfect man to be involved in such a mess...why he even wrote something about well, not really black holes, but darkness... once...

So Ada's Box could be open source free love and could entice bored computer programmers to send in data from wherever it is they are working.  This data could rely on the self-same computer programmers to spot Interesting Things and write more open source programs to spot Interesting Things.  It would not be run by economists, or governments, or companies.  Just a bunch of open-source programmers.

So - would that just inspire chaos?  Would anything reliable come out of it?  Would any company agree to such a thing?  It would have to somehow become anonymous data as soon as it went in, encrypted identities if you'd like.  There would certainly be villains as programmers are naturally inclined in that direction, but, would it actually function reasonably well - a la Wikipedia?  And then, in this black hole of data - high-speed star formations such as enormous growth in various derivatives or other invented things might be seen before they get too large?  Maybe?

Or has Missmarketcrash been fantasizing too much again?