README

Flawed prototype of a DSL for defining markets at Geneity.

2014's Christmas project.

See http://www.martin-griffin.com/blog/geneity.html#market-dsl

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Hi all,

I finally got around to creating some proof of concept code for
representing markets as functions of the state of an event (realized as
an expression that transforms a property of the state).  It's looking
very promising, I have a pretty clear idea of how to evolve the design
and implement the features I want.

Here's an example of some of the stuff it can do already (based on
example.py):


# No goals.
>>> football0 = football(['home', 'away'], [])

# Home has scored one goal.
>>> football1 = football(['home', 'away'], [period.begin, goal('home')])

# MRES.  The team(s) that has scored the max number of goals.
>>> most_goals = max(map(partition(goals, 'team'), len))

# A tie is represented as both teams, so we can support n-way sports.
>>> result(most_goals, football0)
set(['home', 'away'])

>>> result(most_goals, football1)
set(['home'])

# How we expect the prices to shift between football0 and football1.
# TODO: The keys of this dict should be sets like for result.
>>> trend(most_goals, football0, football1)
{('home', 'away'): -1, ('away',): -1, ('home',): 1}

# There's a static grid in gfootball.py that favors away.
# TODO: The keys of this dict should be sets like for result.
>>> calculate = gfootball(football0)
>>> calculate(most_goals)
{('home', 'away'): 0.3 ('away',): 0.6 ('home',): 0.1}


example.py also contains TOTG and something similar to FGSC but with
teams as selections.

The code itself is... okay.  It's very much a work in progress and many
things that you would expect to work will blow up with an AssertionError
(if you're lucky!)  Some of the algorithm code I know is wrong and yet
more of it is likely wrong without me having realized yet.  The next
things I'll be working on are, in roughly priority order:

- Support attr and nth in trend.

- Choose a better (and consistent!) set of names for the modules,
functions and variables.

- Add tests that verify eval, trend and calculate are in-line with each
other; e.g. if eval(expr, state) has a result then
calculate(state)(expr) should return 1 for that result and 0 for the others.

- Make gfootball look at the state when creating its grid; currently you
get some very interesting results when asking for the probabilities of
an event that has goals.

- Make eval fail if the periods it is looking at are open.

- Extend typeof so that it returns more useful, non-adhoc types; rewrite
members so that it uses those types.

- Support market definitions with free variables (e.g.
most_goals_in_period where which period isn't specified in the
definition); this is equivalent to market extras.

- Reorder parameters to eval etc so that the most likely to be fixed
parameters are on the left (makes partial application possible); this
requires using something other than singledispatch.

- Add automatic dispatching on properties of the operations that
couldn't reasonably have identical implementations, e.g., the function
to map or the collection to retrieve.

- Infer which markets could be handicapped, over-under-ed and
odd-even-ed (are there more?).

- Infer the data currently in tMktSortSport.

- Overhaul state; it's a quick hack currently, and I think I have a much
better design that will lend itself to a similar level of introspection
(e.g. to automatically build the in-play UIs).

I'm pretty sure that, if we wanted to, we could incorporate this code
into the legacy sportsbook without *too* much effort.  Let me know if
you think this is worth pursuing and I'll try to come up with a
migration plan as I work.

As usual your feedback is greatly appreciated,
  Martin