Since mt gox does that report and basically brings out amazing stats and information about their service. I was wondering if they added a variable on to the submit trade call, that tells if your a bot. I know I would add this to my bot. I be curious to see how many trades are from bots, where the bots are fighting and pushing up or down the price. Could be cool information I think.
I agree that would be cool information. However I'm not sure there is a reliable way to tell a bot from a human running a regular app. If the bot fails to identify itself as such, or the human decides to lie there isn't a way to enforce that.
I can tell you though that as a project for school and later as a contract for a financial services firm that I've written applications which can analyze market data and separate bot from human activity.
It's pretty simple when you get down to it. You take all the market data you can get your hands on and apply signal processing techniques to it to filter out the noise (humans) and look for individual patterns in the signal. Once you identify patterns you group the patterns together and look for relationships between those patterns. These relationships are your bots (or the cumulative effect of several similar bots). Next you analyze your patterns for ratio relationships such as peak, valley & slope. Now you have uncovered the algorithm(s) driving your bot(s).
MtGox has 7 distinct patterns, there are 3.5 bots responsible for about 60% of all volume.
It used to have 4 but we lost a pattern the day after Bitcoinica was closed.
Also since Bitcoinica has been gone there has been a significant run up in price. I think the way they encouraged shorting was driving down the market price. The other possibility is the August peak / December valley cyclical curve may have kicked in which is something showing up as a possible bot (hence .5)
