Some things, perhaps, cannot be reduced to a set of mathematical equations.
It is then programmed by loading a set of mathematical equations into the lattice.
Forecasters like Prakken and Varvares use their computers to trawl through reams of data about historical spending patterns and generate a precise set of mathematical equations.
There will be a "secret sauce" of some sort, usually a complicated set of mathematical algorithms meant to insure better returns than the market in general delivers.
Pythagoras also gave us the idea of the "music of the spheres," a set of mathematical relationships that would describe the structure of the universe itself.
What Wissner-Gross has supplied is, at best, a set of mathematical tools, with no real results beyond a handful of toy problems.
(In most economic models, individuals are seen as automatons who maximize "utility functions" by obeying a set of mathematical "first order conditions").
Then again, sometimes the algorithms win, humiliating us with their ability to transform our beloved individuality into a set of mathematical near certainties.
As he laboured in each field consumer behaviour, public finance, international trade, business cycles he encountered similar problems, which yielded to the same set of mathematical techniques.
This is what the universe of hit songs from the past five years looks like structurally; hits come out of a small, predictable, and highly conserved set of mathematical patterns.
We will never fully explain the world by appealing to something outside it that must simply be accepted on faith, be it an unexplained God or an unexplained set of mathematical laws.
