Sara Sheehan’s guest this episode is Noah Healy, the founder of Coordisc, who joins Sara to discuss his work in market design and game theory. Noah, who has a background in nuclear engineering and software development, developed a new system called Coordinated Discovery Markets (CDMs). He explains what the technology aims to do in regards to creating efficient marketplaces. His system, inspired by mathematical problem-solving, allows markets to function with much less data processing compared to traditional financial markets, and he illustrates how this makes transactions more efficient and transparent.
Noah shares the challenges he faced in bringing his innovation to market. He has been involved in a lengthy patent process, which has included legal battles with the U.S. Patent Office. Bureaucratic pushback forced him to take his case to a federal court. But despite the setbacks, he talks about how he is actively working on projects in Sweden and Kenya, exploring how his technology could be applied in emerging markets like bamboo trading and carbon credits.
Sara and Noah explore how he envisions his technology revolutionizing global markets, significantly boosting economic wealth, and finding applications in agriculture, commodities, and resource extraction. His goal is to establish new marketplaces that leverage CDMs to create more stable and fair pricing mechanisms. Noah also touched on artificial intelligence and automation, broader implications of such advances. His conversation with Sara emphasizes that technology is reshaping industries in ways that challenge traditional beliefs and that embracing these shifts carefully is key to sustainable progress.
About Noah Healy:
When Noah looks at the common thread that runs through all of his professional experiences, it is clear that he loves to combine mathematics with technology to produce game-changing solutions. His inspiration came from his formal education, work experience and the breakthrough innovations developed by Alan Turing (and Frege and Church before him). Turing imagined machines with amazing computational power and ultimately brought them to life. His innovations tipped the scales of WWII and set the stage for the information revolution – of which Noah is an active part.
Early in his career, Noah used computational mathematics and software development capabilities to develop automations that boosted internal productivity, drove client efficiencies and improved regulatory compliance. Most recently he founded Coordisc and developed CDM, a technology product that has the potential to completely reorder the global financial system. CDM establishes a better exchange market for commodities by conducting all trades at market-clearing prices with radically improved price discovery, lower total cost of transactions and the elimination of hedging needs. Only a fraction of current tradeflow can get this product off the ground and prove its power. From there, CDM can be scaled rapidly.
It is not lost on Noah that he has an enormous responsibility to produce algorithmic technology products that drive results, but also protect ethics and morality. One does not need to look beyond recent financial crises or their Facebook feeds to see that our rush for more powerful technology has eroded our civic, political, cultural and societal systems. He views himself as an “algorithmist with a conscience” and uses tools such as game theory to design products ethically.
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Contact Sara Sheehan | Sara Sheehan Consulting:
Noah Healy | Coordisc:
- Website: coordisc.com
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Transcript
Sara Sheehan: [00:00:03] Hi there, I’m Sara Sheehan and welcome to my podcast, Transformational Thinkers with Sara Sheehan. Today I’m joined by Noah Healy, founder of Coordisc. Noah is a market designer and game theorist working on creating better economic systems. After pursuing a degree in nuclear engineering, he worked for technology startups as a software engineer at the peak of the dotcom boom. Becoming fascinated by the mathematics of information, communications and computation, it all led to patent work on a better commodity market design, which in turn led to the creation of his company, Coordisc. Welcome, Noah. I’m so glad to have you on Transformational Thinkers.
Noah Healy: [00:01:01] I’m glad to be here, too. Thanks for having me on.
Sara Sheehan: [00:01:04] Excellent. So, Noah, tell me a little bit about your business and what led you to create it.
Noah Healy: [00:01:12] Coordisc is, effectively, an IP shell. It exists to license the technology that underlies Coordisc, which I call Coordinated Discovery Markets, which is where I got the name from. CDMs are this new machine that allows for the operation of markets with vastly less work than traditional financial markets require to operate. That got started when I figured out how to build such a machine as a result of solving a series of math problems I was working on. When I wrote one of these things up to test it, I discovered that the computer that I owned at the time would have been able to handle roughly half of the world’s transaction traffic just within itself, which is vastly better than modern systems are capable of doing. That was the springboard. If you can make marketplaces more efficient, then you make your economy grow faster because there’s a lot less waste, both in cost of operating the market and in people misallocating. You’re not going to try to do something that people don’t want because you know what people want and you can grow towards, and build towards, what’s actually desired. So that’s what put me on the path I’m on.
Sara Sheehan: [00:02:49] That’s fascinating. So you are at the point where you have not only computational models and algorithms developed, but you’re at the point where you’re actually testing markets out. Is that correct?
Noah Healy: [00:03:07] There are a handful of projects that are trying to get off the ground incorporating the technology. Load testing the technology is something that’s practical just with standard off-the-shelf hardware. The laptop I now own would be able to handle the entire global current transaction volume, because it’s a bit more. To put this in context, the network connection that we’re currently talking over would be strong enough to handle the requirements. Whereas the existing markets are generating petabytes of data every year. That information needs to be available in the sub-millisecond range. The bandwidth requirements, both in terms of throughput and latency, are both extraordinary. To the extent that many of the bigger firms co-locate inside the marketplace themselves. This effectively solves all of those problems.
Sara Sheehan: [00:04:17] Can you get a tiny bit more specific with me about what you’re actually doing within Coordisc?
Noah Healy: [00:04:27] Absolutely. Markets have been operating on exactly the same principle for roughly eight centuries now. They’re built around this model that there are people that want to buy things and people that want to sell things. The marketplace standardizes the thing being bought and sold so that you don’t have to dicker over every little jot and tittle. But then it just says, people want to buy, people want to sell. Doesn’t matter whether or not you’re operating the marketplace or just showing up. Doesn’t matter whether you own any of this stuff or not. We’re just going to make deals that you will then be committed to executing on. It gets a little bit more complicated with higher and higher levels of sophistication, but basically that’s all there is. There’s just buyers and sellers who are buying and selling deals that will happen eventually. They’re committing themselves to one side or another. The problem with this is that we have computers now. We have computers automating, depending on how you count, somewhere between 97%, 98% of all of the business in the marketplace. More like 99.999% of all the business that happens in the marketplace. That volume of information becomes so much to wade through that you also need computers to mediate your interaction with the market space.
Noah Healy: [00:06:01] As a result of this, there’s an enormous overhead of noise that’s in the system. I’ve come up with a way to split the game into producers who have substance and want to sell it, consumers who have cash and want to buy substance, and forecasters who basically are just a hat. Producers can wear the forecaster hat. Consumers, concerned third parties with expertise, whoever can wear the forecaster hat. The system pre-negotiates a fair price that’s available to everybody, and then measures the accuracy of the fair price by seeing how producers and consumers choose to respond to it. Just like when you go to the grocery store, you look at the price on the shelf and you take it or you don’t take it. You don’t negotiate further beyond that. What this does is it combines that grocery store style buying and selling with a mechanism that figures out where those prices need to go, so that the store shelves are always stocked when you show up, and everything just flows properly.
Sara Sheehan: [00:07:15] This technology that you’ve developed, I understand that you have been pursuing patents and have patents pending?
Noah Healy: [00:07:25] I have a patent pending. Well, I don’t own the patent. I was working for another company at the time, but there is a patent with my name on it. I came up with the notion, a different company pursued it. This one I’ve been working on for the better part of a decade now, and it is now in federal court. In fact, I just filed the paperwork yesterday. That case is going before a federal judge. The patent office has spent the last four years breaking their own procedures, and their current case is that they are allowed to break their procedures. The fact that none of the reasons that they’ve put forth are factually defensible is meaningless, because apparently I haven’t presented facts about reality in ways that the law is forced to recognize. Their position, literally their conclusion, is that they are legally correct. Which I definitely hope isn’t true because they are factually well out over their skis. One of their core arguments is that one equals two, in fact. So we’ll see how federal judges respond to this, but that’s where things have gotten to.
Sara Sheehan: [00:08:48] Interesting. I’m sure it’s been an odyssey getting through the registration of a patent and then now starting with a lawsuit. I’m sure it’s a lot of things that you weren’t anticipating.
Noah Healy: [00:09:07] I definitely was not, no. I was not expecting that the patent process would be guaranteed by any stretch of the imagination, but after going through the first five years to get the notice allowance, I felt pretty triumphant back in 2020. Then it’s just been a series of bizarre rug pulls and literally insane statements about reality that mostly get retracted after I submit mathematical proof that it’s not possible for what their claims are to be true. But they keep the lump under the rug, they keep trying to pull this stuff over and over again. This is fairly close to the last resort. I’m in the appellate court for the Federal Circuit. The only court in the land higher than this one is the Supreme Court. It would be quite something to have to get there, but we’ll see what happens. I just dropped my copies of the case in the mail, and once everything is set there then they’ll assign some judges and we’ll find out what they have to say about all this.
Sara Sheehan: [00:10:26] My goodness, you’re going to have a fascinating story to tell, without a doubt. Noah, can you talk a little bit about what your current growth plans are for your business?
Noah Healy: [00:10:38] There’s pretty much two strategies, and without the patent one of them is not practical. If the patent were to be granted this year, which like I said it’s been accepted twice, maybe it’ll finally happen. If that were to happen, then licensing and particular sale of patents to existing market operators is something that’s not at all unusual. There’s something called the Lange patent, that’s a patent that lapsed in 2020 on various kinds of parimutuel betting. It belonged, back when it existed, to the CME Group which is the world’s premier commodity market operator. Getting a patent and selling it to them is pretty much the standard way that you bring this kind of thing to market. The other one is a lot more guerilla. That’s where these four existing projects come out of. Where I’m scouring the earth and trying to network, to find people that would like to set up new marketplaces. There’s been some movement on one of those recently. Unfortunately, it’s under an NDA. My contact in Sweden, she was invited to Davos this year and has 3 or 4 different projects she’s now interested in, so we’ll see if those come off. There’s another one I just started that might get me up to five. Somebody I was talking to just this month from Kenya, we had been talking about onions before, but he’s more interested in bamboo, evidently. They’re doing things in Africa with greening the desert projects and some other things. Giant bamboo could be a tremendous natural resource if they started getting it going there, but there aren’t standard bamboo marketplaces. It would be coming in under the umbrella of some carbon trading markets which are in pretty disarray. Carbon trading is not a particularly stable business yet. The potential to create one or more stabilizing markets around bamboo could help him launch that industry in that country. He’s pulling a business plan together, I expect to be talking to him at the end of next week.
Sara Sheehan: [00:13:14] You have kind of launched into it, these are just a couple examples of how your technology could transform or create a market. But I’d love to hear from you, are there industries that you know you want to play in at the outset?
Noah Healy: [00:13:35] Not at the outset, so much. At the outset it’s, wherever the seed starts to sprout is where I want to grow from. But the cost of the existing markets is larger than the margins of the existing operators. US agriculture, wheat farmers, are operating at around 14% margins. Overall, across the board, commodity market overheads are on the order of 16%. Cutting the commodity market overhead in half would increase their income by more than 50%. My system could conceivably drop many orders of magnitude off the cost of the commodity market. That would be transformative to the entire agricultural industry. Extractive industries like minerals are, in some cases, even worse. Oil companies rather famously run around 10%, 8% to 12% margins. The more liquid the market is, the lower the overheads are. I don’t think overheads in oil markets are up around the 16% line, but again, the lower the margin is, the greater the return. We could see improvements across those sectors, in particular, with modern technology. There’s a lot of minerals that are incredibly valuable. Lithium, cobalt, many of the rare earths that have never been valuable enough to have markets attached to them. That has led to those businesses being monopolistic, very extractive, not well regulated. You might have heard some horror stories about cobalt extraction, I think they’re actually true. I think it would be fantastic if we had markets that were capable of thriving and allowing us to start bringing some sense and civilization to the materials that we need to live modern lives.
Sara Sheehan: [00:15:48] That’s a fascinating entry that may lead to future conversations for you. I feel very certain when you’re talking about rare earth minerals that are only visible to a very select few, and being able to lower the barrier, honestly that is transformative. Can you talk a little bit about what your biggest challenges have been and how you’re overcoming them?
Noah Healy: [00:16:27] My biggest challenge has always been explaining what it is that I’m talking about. Even in this patent production, as part of putting my case together for the court, I had attached four math and physics papers from across the first half of the 20th century. The words that the Patent Office is using are superficially reasonable, it’s just that their implications happen to be mathematically false. It isn’t particularly well known as the work of Alan Turing, whose name you’ve probably heard of, or Haskell Curry, whose name you almost certainly have never heard of, or Andrey Kolmogorov, who’s another person you’ve probably never heard of. They and hundreds of other brilliant people have effectively reconstructed our beliefs about things like philosophy and imagination and mathematics in ways that are not particularly well appreciated. What it means is that it’s fairly easy to generate BS that looks plausible but is meaningless. Explaining that it’s meaningless involves walking people through a PhD thesis, and that’s not the kind of thing that’s conducive to persuasion. Working out metaphors and stories and phrases that get the idea from on the page or in the computer or in my head into somebody else’s head is the challenge that I’ve been iteratively banging against for a decade now.
Sara Sheehan: [00:18:24] Just to double click on this discussion right now, as well as our earlier discussion about what your company is and what you’re doing, is it safe to say, in simple terms, that you have created the mathematical algorithm that performs the work of looking at a particular market and identifying pricing for that market so that trade could occur?
Noah Healy: [00:18:59] That’s pretty fair. The subtlety, if I can add it in, is that it doesn’t look at a market, it acts as the market. This isn’t a magic trick. People are doing all the work, same as we do in regular marketplaces, this just lets us do that work much more efficiently. So it’s like having a bike instead of having to walk.
Sara Sheehan: [00:19:28] So within the technology, someone would be entering the goods to be sold, and the market, would it accurately price those goods for the consumers that would be buying it?
Noah Healy: [00:19:43] Again, it is the people that are doing the accurate pricing. Let’s say you and I were going to set up a market in grass seed. We would decide, what constituted grass seed, we’re selling it by the ton, whatnot. We would set up a schedule. We’re going to sell weekly grass seed by the ton. We’d set some initial prices, but the users themselves would be able to come in and say, the weather is looking like this, I think prices are going up this year. This is how inflation is working, I think prices are going up even more this year. So they would come in and negotiate what prices they think they were going to be seeing for the buy and the sell sides. The system would integrate all that information into a unified whole, which it would then present back to the users and say, you crazy kids came up with this thing, how much do you believe in it now that it’s real? Do you want to trade? Then they would trade however much they believe in the prices that they negotiated. By doing that over and over again, it doesn’t take that many cycles before prices are set at the level that gets people to want to trade because that’s how you make money. By setting prices that other people will trade at, you make money. By selling at the price that everybody has agreed to, you make money. By buying at the price that everybody has agreed to, you make money. That behavior, that’s the important stuff. My bit is the set of machines that can manage those relationships. The integrations, the balancing and so on.
Sara Sheehan: [00:21:36] Thank you for that clarification because I think it’s helpful. It creates an illustration that’s very easy to understand about how your technology works. I believe it may help an individual out there that believes they have a perfect scenario to use your technology and self-identify for them. Being able to explain it in those terms is super helpful. Moving to another thought, what are your aspirational goals that you’re currently working on in your business this year?
Noah Healy: [00:22:31] My primary aspirational goal is to get one of these projects off the ground. It is highly encouraging that these two recent things, one where I’ve been talking to the people from Sweden for several years now. Her opportunities are getting sharper and clearer, and she’s getting better and better partners so that’s fantastic. This other conversation, this is something that’s fairly recent. This guy is bi-country. He’s a local here, but he’s also from Kenya originally. He’s got a great reputation. I met him through some people I’ve had long term relationships with here in town. He seems to have a pretty exciting set of ideas around where things can go. Africa is the burgeoning marketplace of the world. That’s kind of the only place on Earth with a growing population and a young population. So getting a foothold there is essentially getting a foothold in the future.
Sara Sheehan: [00:23:44] Fascinating. How would you characterize your vision for the future of Coordisc? If you were to paint a picture of what that vision is, what would it be?
Noah Healy: [00:23:57] The motto of the company is ‘better markets for a wealthier world’. The overall cost of operating our financial system is around the same size as the global growth rate of economics. Making those systems radically more efficient, in my estimation, would double human wealth. And that’s it, that’s the goal.
Sara Sheehan: [00:24:28] Excellent. Restate the beginning of that again, having said it once.
Noah Healy: [00:24:34] Services are what’s known as a deadweight loss. You go to an attorney, you pay the money, they provide you a service, that’s great. If they charged you half as much, that service would be better, as long as it was the same service. You go to the dentist, you get your teeth cleaned, and it turns out you don’t have a cavity, that’s great. If they charged you half as much and it was the same service, it would be worth more money because it would cost less. The same thing works for your bank, the same thing works for the marketplace. If a financial service can be provided at less cost, then you have more money for your day to day life. If we reverse engines on what we’ve been doing with computers and finance for the last 30 to 50 years and make those systems massively more efficient, the trillions of dollars that we currently use to operate systems that are centuries old can be used for taking your kid to the movies, or buying a new pair of shoes, or improving the tractor that you use to plow. Everything else that you might be able to do with money, whether for pleasure or for investment, now becomes available with that money and all of that snowballs.
Sara Sheehan: [00:26:06] That definitely brings it down to a level where you understand how it could impact your daily life.
Noah Healy: [00:26:13] It’s quite invisible how much these things do impact your daily life. Aluminum, I think it’s fading out, but for a few decades, in the aughts to the teens of the 2000s, there was a thing that meant that the aluminum marketplace was sucking, somewhere in the neighborhood of, 20% of the value of aluminum out of the system. It might have been quite a bit more than that, but I think it was at least 20%. If you had bought aluminum foil during that time period, more or less, 20 cents out of the dollar that you spent wouldn’t have gone to the factory that was rolling and packaging that, or the store that you bought it in, or the people that refined the bauxite or the people that mined the ore. It would go on to people that had figured out how to stick a wedge between the people that make raw aluminum, and the people that make aluminum products, and extract 20% of the value at that step. You probably didn’t buy billions of dollars of aluminum during that time frame, but collectively, we all did. Aluminum is around $125 billion a year that would have been around $25 billion a year for around a decade.
Sara Sheehan: [00:27:43] That’s a ton of money. That is an absolute ton of money.
Noah Healy: [00:27:47] It’s absolutely unreal to think about what the consequences of this are and how widespread those consequences are.
Sara Sheehan: [00:27:57] It’s fascinating and very thought provoking to think about what the art of possibility is for this technology. As you look forward, what other big concerns do you have as you see the road ahead?
Noah Healy: [00:28:19] The big concern comes down to whether or not I’ll be able to stay in the game long enough to get over the hump, but also the other implications. Marketplaces are not the only system we have that’s hundreds of years old, that is heavily and completely disrupted by the internet plus computers. We’re seeing a lot of disruption in culture and politics and religion, with globalized communication. I think we need to talk about these things very seriously. I think that we’re at a new moment in history that is distinct from previous times, because technology is something that does things that aren’t just things that weren’t anticipated, but when they were being anticipated, people thought it was going to go the other direction. This is a story I’ve told before. Alan Turing, he’s starting to get into pop culture a little bit. He wasn’t trying to invent the computer, he was trying to solve a math problem, a very famous math problem. It had to do with integer arithmetic, basically the kind of math that we teach to kids who are not yet two digit numbers old. It was believed at the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century that we had gotten very close, and that with 1 or 2 more breakthroughs, we would be able to fully solve all those problems. There would be a formula, you could plug it in, you would always be able to figure out what the answer to any one of those problems was. And that was the problem. It was like, hey mathematics, why don’t you guys go out and do the work and figure out what those 1 or 2 little problem areas left are, so we can completely solve this entire branch of mathematics. Alan Turing was working on that problem, and what he discovered is, that can’t happen. Nobody thought it was going to come out that way.
Sara Sheehan: [00:30:32] Double click on that a little bit for our listeners to explain the implications of that.
Noah Healy: [00:30:40] We have this branch of math, integer arithmetic, that’s so simple looking we teach it to six year olds. It was thought, after a couple thousand years of development, that we’d be able to solve any problem imaginable within that scope. Instead of discovering that, in fact, yes you can and here’s how, Alan Turing discovered that it was impossible because it was actually unimaginable that it could be possible. That not only is integer arithmetic in some sense fundamentally impossible in a way that non-integer arithmetic isn’t, but that imagination itself has limits, and that mathematics can show us things that are over the line. That we can think about knowing that they’re over the line, that we can’t imagine, and that we can do mathematical proofs based around that. That if your construction, if your proof, if your idea depends on something that’s over that line, then it can never be real, because you would never be able to imagine the thing that you would need to rest on. That’s not a living part of our debates about how we should put our societies together, how we should put our cultures together. There’s been millennia of Promethean striving, this belief that while certainly there are things that are beyond reach, they’re just beyond our reach. That the next generation standing on the shoulders of giants will reach further and we’ll get there.
Noah Healy: [00:32:30] We have seen places we will never go because there is nothing there, and we thought we were going to those places. It has all kinds of incredible implications to actually bring those ideas back in house and try to come up with how to operate. Even in conversations among people, we aren’t the last word. There’s still an objective physical, measurable quality to these things that we used to think of as debatable and we can now understand are mechanizable. And being mechanizable, we have to do that responsibly. Another example I like to bring out is, if you had an operating table saw in your living room, and pets and children, eventually something absolutely horrifying would happen to one of those pets or children. The internet is radically more powerful than any manufacturing machine that’s ever been invented, and pretty much everybody has a running copy of that in their living room.
Sara Sheehan: [00:33:55] Yes, definitely. Do you have any perspective on what you think the big problems are that we might solve, that we don’t think that we can solve today?
Noah Healy: [00:34:14] Much as with earlier shifts, when we went to the Industrial Revolution, there were people that were noting that the peasants were leaving the farms and moving to the cities. They said, our society depends on four out of five people doing back breaking dawn to dusk labor in order to produce the amount of food that we all eat. If half those people come into the cities, we’ll make half as much food and half of us will starve to death. That’ll cause a death spiral and everything will fall apart. That was all true, except it turned out that industrialization meant that we could automate farm work. Now we need a fraction of a percent, basically, to make all the food that everybody eats. There’s a lot of trend lines right now that are obviously seriously unsustainable. The things that we’re doing with those, I think in many cases, aren’t going to turn out to be particularly good. But when we find good ways to make these things happen, there’s a lot of tussle over the work from home thing right now, for example. If we found a way to return home life to being an economically viable unit so that people could have a family in their home that was economically viable, much of the existing civic culture around cities and commercial real estate would vanish.
Noah Healy: [00:36:10] There’s a lot of people right now who are talking about how horrifying that is. Many of our wealthy people are wealthy because of their real estate holdings. Our current president, for example, is one of them. But if we squint and look at the similarities and think about us living in a functioning post-universe, who cares? Who cares about the people that effectively mis-invested in having cities and commercial real estate as an extractive tool for human creativity and labor if we can actually solve the problem of economic homesteads. Because those people will be wealthier and happier than we are, and they’re not going to go back. Just as we would look at a 1500s lifestyle and say, not for me. They would look at a 2000s lifestyle and say, I don’t think that people should be forced to live like that. Those kinds of approaches where you have to change behavior and ethics and technology all at the same time in the right way, it’s very challenging. We are the beneficiaries of two such shifts, both the shift to agrarian lifestyles and the shift to industrial lifestyles. I think humans have it in us to make the computational shift.
Sara Sheehan: [00:37:58] Are there any math problems that we think are unsolvable today that you could see being solved in the future?
Noah Healy: [00:38:09] Math is an extremely active area of research right now, and important work gets done basically all the time. Math problems are being gobbled up, I’d imagine more would be. The thing that might turn out to be interesting with some of the technological breakthroughs we’re making, would be in the computational class area. You might have heard of the problem PvNP. That’s the kind of thing that, very optimistically, a computer might turn out to give us some insights into. Because it has to do with what computers would be capable of, not from a possibility standpoint, but from a practicality standpoint.
Sara Sheehan: [00:39:06] Can you give us any detail on what that problem is just so a listener can tune in?
Noah Healy: [00:39:12] Here’s the grade school version. A problem, as in P, or polynomial time, if I tell you the problem you can tell me the answer. A problem like, what is five squared is in P, because if you know what squaring and fives are, you can square five and you can figure out what the answer is. The problems in NP, if I tell you the problem and the answer, and you can tell me whether or not I’m telling you the truth. Everything that’s in P is also in NP. If I say, what’s five squared? It’s 25. You could square five and then say, yeah you’re right. NP are these verifiable problems. An example of a problem that’s not in either of those is the weather. If I say, what temperature is it going to be on average across your entire front porch tomorrow at 3 p.m.? Then I say, it’s going to be 47°F. You don’t know whether I’m telling you the truth. You can wait until tomorrow and set up some thermometers and find out whether or not I told you the truth, but there’s nothing you can do to figure out whether or not I just made that up or if I have access to some god machine in my basement that tells me what the weather’s like tomorrow.
Noah Healy: [00:40:32] There’s these much worse classes above NP, but down at P and NP are problems where if you know the question, you know what the answer is. And problems where if you know the question and the answer, then you know what the answer is. The essential problem is, is there a difference? Can you find a way to take every problem that’s in NP and find a P solution for it? If, number one, you can do that, PvNP would be solved if we determined that there was no way to do it, that would be a solution. But if there’s a solution and the solution is that they’re the same thing, and the solution that the same thing is also efficient, there’s a nice short, quick, easy way to do it. Which they can be the same thing without there being a nice, short, quick, easy way to do it, but if all those things are true, then we start living in a completely different universe. Composing a song that you like and then handing you a copy of a song that you like would mean song composition is in NP, which means that having the ability to like a song would be the same as the ability to create a pop 100 super hit.
Sara Sheehan: [00:42:08] Very thought provoking.
Noah Healy: [00:42:11] Having the ability to enjoy a book would be the same as the ability to write a novel. There’s some very crazy stuff there. But if we look at some of the work that’s coming out of some of the deep learning AI labs, with reverse engineering of protein folding, some of the much more advanced physics-informed fluid dynamics simulations that are happening now, some of the other chemistry tricks that are coming out, many problems that looked to us to be extremely difficult are apparently not as difficult as we thought that they were. That might turn out to be one of them. Maybe there’s some very complicated answer that we haven’t thought about yet that would start to knit those two sides together and bring P and NP into unity, or would solve the problem once and for all and just say, nope, not the same thing.
Sara Sheehan: [00:43:12] Very compelling thoughts. How would our listeners find you to talk about their burgeoning market possibilities and how your technology might be a fit?
Noah Healy: [00:43:31] If you want to talk to me, noahphealy@yahoo.com is my direct email. You can also reach out on LinkedIn, connect there. Happy to chat, I’m Noah Healy there. You can learn more about Coordisc at coordisc.com, there’s a bunch of information resources on that site.
Sara Sheehan: [00:43:51] Excellent. Noah, you are someone that I’m going to want to stay in touch with because your story is one that has many chapters yet to come.
Noah Healy: [00:44:04] That’s what I’m hoping for, until I get to that triumphant climax chapter.
Sara Sheehan: [00:44:15] Exactly. I believe the chapters to come will be interesting and exciting, and I believe they will be transformative, without a doubt. Noah, I really appreciate your time today.
Noah Healy: [00:44:32] Absolutely. Again, thanks for having me here. Always useful to go through and sharpen up the explanations.
Sara Sheehan: [00:44:41] Absolutely, thank you so much.
Noah Healy: [00:44:46] Bye-bye.
Sara Sheehan: [00:44:48] Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Transformational Thinkers. Noah shared profound insights into how advanced mathematical algorithms can reshape global commodity markets, making them more efficient and accessible. It’s a game changer for industries like agriculture and rare earth minerals. Key takeaways from today’s episode: efficiency revolution. Noah’s pioneering work introduces algorithmic systems that enhance market efficiency, promising to double human wealth by cutting massive costs in financial operations. Breakthrough and market dynamics. By transforming how prices are set and negotiated, Noah’s approach allows smoother transactions and better allocation of resources, ultimately benefiting both producers and consumers. Future vision and challenges. The potential to solve pressing economic challenges with innovative market designs is immense, but communicating these complex ideas remains a significant hurdle. Once again, thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. Please weigh in in the comments, and as always, subscribe and never miss an episode.
