i realize that this may be of little importance to some people, but for me, it brings up some questions of efficiency between random guesses an patterned elimination so i think it may be applicable in some way.

playing the game battleship, i plaed my first game guessing squares (randomly as i could) just to see if i could beat the computer that way, with very little logic. I lost by a moderate margin to the computer.

the next game however, i played by clicking on every other square, creating a checkerboard pattern until i hit something. this time i won by good margin.

why? i figure that the computer uses some algorithm to get as near a random as possible until it hits something (maybe someone at AO could answer this). so does mean that patterns prevail over random guessing, in many i cases i would say yes. what i do think is that it shows how one could change a pattern of every possibility to one of every other . soif your looking for a large, sprawling object, is their a need to sort through every possibility or only every other (the minesweeper is the smallest, thus every other is the smallest and best in battleship)? so what im tying to say, is that if algorithms could be patterned to suit the needs of the user, they might be a lot faster. i dont know how this may be applied to securities, but i believe it may help someone optimize their code, even if by a little. i leave it up to the public to apply it (or toss it)