Description: In December 1997, the Society of Actuaries held a conference whose focus was actuarial and financial modeling. During the course of that conference, one of the speakers mentioned a number of technologies his firm was using for modeling, which were either unfamiliar or only vaguely familiar to some of the audience. The purpose of this paper is to define each of the technologies mentioned during that presentation and to briefly describe their distinguishing characteristics. The technologies discussed in this paper are statistical pattern recognition [SPR], neural networks [NNs], genetic algorithms [GAs], simulated annealing, fractal analysis, chaos theory, rule induction, data fusion algorithms [DFAs], data compression, fuzzy logic, case-based reasoning, and expert systems.

Description: The purpose of this paper is to discuss computer application, the management of an insurance enterprise in an automobile insurance marketplace wherein a number of insurers compete for marketshare and profit. The paper begins with a description of the computer program next, a cursory description of the model is given then, the assumptions of the model are discussed next, potential future modifications are discussed and, finally, a prognosis is given.