Did an Ancient Civilization Have Computers?

Corona Del Mar, CA

Hey Friend,

When you really dig deep into ancient Egypt, it'll leave you scratching your head wondering "how the heck did they do that?" Well, things just took a turn to perhaps the greatest discovery in modern history. Just a month ago, we were discussing in this newsletter how a team of engineers measured an ancient Egyptian vase with a laser.

The results? The vase was precise...too precise. "The largest deviation from absolutely perfect is 0.032 millimeters." For comparison, the width of a human hair is 0.06 millimeters. A modern CNC machine has a tolerance of 0.127 mm, so even if this piece and the thousands of others like it were fakes from modern times...it's still too precise!

The team had the foresight to put their measurements into an STL 3D file. Well dang it if a rather resourceful gentleman figured out that the vase could be represented by precise mathematical formulas. Deepening the mystery...did I mention the vase is made from solid granite (about as hard as a steel nail)? And the precision of the cuts means that the whole thing had to be made in one pass -- there are no tool changes.

After some intense math, the author of the paper makes a remarkable conclusion. There is only one category of machines that can take a mathematical model and output the movements of a lathe ...a computer.

The lesson here is that just ONE piece of evidence can upend everything you know to be true. It's the sign of a healthy mind to change your tune in the presence of new information. For example, I spent around $500k and 18 months on a cloud computing project that looked at every possible combination of price patterns to see which were the most profitable.

There weren't any! We ended up disproving an entire branch of technical analysis. Price patterns DO NOT work. Fibonacci's DO NOT work. Trend lines DO NOT work.

Yet yet like a grain of sand becomes a pearl, that initial exploration into cloud computing led to one of the greatest discoveries in the world of trading.

Strategy Cycles: Knowing exactly which strategies have the greatest likelihood of profitability...so you only trade them and forget the rest.

I've got a hunch that this might just be the secret sauce behind the astonishing consistency of Renaissance Technologies, raking in a staggering $100 billion in profits over the years.

And that's what we'll talk more about in tomorrow's update.

See you then...

P.S. If you're itching to learn more about the enigmatic precision of the ancient Egyptian vase, take a gander at this >>