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Re: Reverse engineering a formula...

by roboticus (Chancellor)
on Jun 13, 2006 at 12:09 UTC ( [id://555012]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Reverse engineering a formula...

devnul:

I'm not a financial analyst, but it seems to me that if you google payoff, amortization, net present value, etc., you'll get some standard formulae you can use as a starting point. Then you can use the hack and slash method, by playing with proportionality constants, etc., until you can match up the numbers, or you can also google for "curve fitting" and give it a try.

That could be a lot of work, however. Have you considered writing a program to simulate the operator and making your perl script do the key-entry to get the data you need out of the existing machine?

--roboticus

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Re^2: Reverse engineering a formula...
by dsheroh (Monsignor) on Jun 13, 2006 at 15:01 UTC
    roboticus speaks wisely.

    Many, many years ago, in the era of Windows 3.1 and Token Ring networks, I had a temp job at the local power company. I was given the task to transfer data from their mainframe application into a database running on the Windows network. As with the original question here, there were several thousand records to transfer and the mainframe application would only display one at a time.

    I have no idea how many hours (days!) they expected me to spend doing data entry on this task, nor how they intended to handle the errors that would surely have resulted, but it didn't prove that easy for them to keep me busy... I quickly taught the Windows macro recorder a sequence of keystrokes to copy and paste the data, then read a magazine for about an hour (getting many dirty looks from passers-by) and reported the task complete.

    And on that day, I learned both the wisdom of simulating a human operator to carry out repetitive tasks and the joy of suffering the reactions of others to one who truly "works smarter, not harder".

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