[clpmsf]

I listened to a talk to that Jim Simons gave at San Francisco State University about a decade ago in which he mostly recounts his life and career. Towards the end when he was describing the state of the fully realized RenTech firm, he mentioned that they collect approximately 7TB of data per day, and that the #1 investment rule is that a human never, under any circumstances, intervenes with what the model (he said "the computer") decides.

[winddude]

Which in those days was absolutely staggering. But I think they were looking for similar patterns in historical data to current data, not trying to fit current data into a set of predefined patterns or algos from historical data.