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Patent Invention Machines
kryzx writes: "Here's one to tickle your imagination: using genetic programming to come up with new, patentable solutions to problems. Could be happening very soon. Here's an article
at MIT Technology Review. This work, being done at Stanford
and Genetic Programming Inc. by
John Koza and company has already succeeded at reproducing quite a few ideas for existing patents, ranging from old to very recent. It's apparently much easier to compare against existing patents than sift through hundreds of surviving algorithms to determine if they are useful, original, and patentable.) Also, this company is a good target for your tech envy, with their 1,000-node Beowulf-style
cluster
of Pentium II 350's and 70-node cluster of 533 MHz DEC Alpha's. (There are pix, too. PII cluster on the main page, Alphas here.) Wanna play with the toys? They have
job openings for programmers. :-)"
Imagine a beowulf cluster of there... oh wait, nevermind.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
for (int i = 0; ;i++) { :)
submit_patent_request(i + "click patenting");
}
that wasn't so hard
Don't think evolution is the work of an infinite number of monkeys. 1000 Pentiums is not a lot in the grand scheme of things. Enumeration just doesn't work.
The best way someone phrased it was to compare evolution with the well-known 'infinite improbability drive'.
Improbable stuff happens all the time, the trick is to keep the good improbable stuff and get rid of the fluff. Then build on the improbable stuff and wait for more improbability to happen (which it will). Repeat.
Figuring which of the improbable stuff is improbable enough to get rewarded a monopoly by the state is indeed a whole other issue. You might not want an expert but a patent lawyer would come in handy.
How patently obvious
High-quality Linux web hosting for geeks and coders.
I feel the reason for running this project is wrong. "Let's start a project so we can register loads of patents" should instead be "Let's start a project to benefit humanity"
Omigosh! You mean... the guys who run this experiment are... ALIENS?!
In all seriousness, some of the *worst* disasters have been brought about by people trying to "benefit humanity". Crack-dealer infested housing projects, Eugenics etc...
That's not to say that capitalists don't screw up too, but I maintain a healthy skepticism towards altruists. So these guys want to patent stuff. Big deal. At least we know where we stand with them. When the idealists get a hold of things, you never know how they are going to f*** you.
This reminds me of teachers in school. There were many different kinds of teachers, but I'm thinking of two specific types. The first was the stern old man with the ruler. On the first day of class you thought it was going to be miserable, but then you got to know him, learned a lot, and by the last day you missed him. The second was the hippy teacher with the tie-die and the long hair. On the first day, you thought it would be an easy class, but then he had to lay down the law and it turned out that he wasn't very competent either.
Such is the way with capitalists and idealists.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
However, the evolved solutions were limited in their scope. If the chip created through natural selection was tested in an environment of a moderately different humidity or temperature, it's tricks wouldn't work. Just like real-life animals, their niche tricks worked only in a niche environment. In a way, it's all a problem of chaos theory -- sensitivity to initial conditions.
I expect these evolved patents will face similar difficulties. Yes, they'll work great, but only in the specific environment or parameters for which the software originally was programmed. Change things just a little bit, and it has to start all over again. Which makes for great demonstrations of the software, but poor practial, patentable solutions that people will buy.
No, the patent making machine has already thought of that idea and patented itself in advance.
The idealists may not start out wanting to f*** you, but all too often they enter what I like to call the "dictator's delusion".
It works something like this:
Step 1. "The World would be great if everybody (blank)ed". This is the essence of idealism.
Step 2. A few people will (blank) but not everybody. Laws are passed to encourage people to (blank).
Step 3. Encouraging people to (blank) becomes a proxy for making the world a better place.
Step 4. The delusion is complete. The leaders of the revolution totally forget about making the world a better place, and cling stubbornly to the ideal that (blank) will do that. They forget the fundamental laws like "love thy neighbor" and cling to their preconceived notions of what is best, even when it is demonstrably flawed. Two famous examples: The Pharisees in the Bible and the leaders of any "communist" nation refusing to reform while the proletariat starves. Both groups started out with an ideal. In the first case it was religious, and in the second place political. The result is the same though.
I hope you get this. I can't tell you how many times I've frustrated people who try to pigeon-hole me into either a "leftist" or "rightest" category. Both are "ideals" and flawed because There is no algorithm for right living.
I think I probably summed it up best in this rather off-the-wall essay.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Better yet, just run a quantum simulation of this guy's setup, complete with lab, thousands of "experts" to evaluate the output, etc.
Then patent everything they would before they do, and claim you're just really bright.
Better still, avoid the search and just run a quantum simulation of our world 20 years into the future, 100 years, etc. and look at all the cool devices that sold millions of copies, and "invent" them yourself. Max Headroom's error in visiting ST:TNG was that he went to a warship instead of just cloaking himself in earth orbit and connecting to their Ineternet and looking up old stuff. Get out of your advanced ship? Idiot.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Or you could patent the idea of patenting the idea of running a computer program to generate patentable ideas. Unless their computer already thought of that.
-... ---
I mean which person really came up with idea if it was an AI? It would be the "computers" patentable idea, not some person. The computer would then need to sign over ownership of the idea to its employer. And uhmm it would seemingly have other rights here.
Try this one. Koza got a patent on genetic programming as a whole. The technique of avoiding existing patents is just an interesting corrollary.
Its probably a bit off topic from this article, but i think this whole thing about being able to patent algorithms is just a stupid thing. Algos are not some kind of inventions, they are LOGIC, no one should be able to patent logic. The patent bureau play god by giving patents for algorithms, they decide who can use logic for free and who must pay.
It's apparently much easier to compare against existing patents than sift through hundreds of surviving algorithms to determine if they are useful, original, and patentable.
Patents are not about usefulness, its purpose is for making quick bucks
Why waste money on scientist researches. Insteed, invest in an army of lawyer to enforce your patent later.
I recall reading an interesting article from FeedMag (now on ice) about a "simple" GA that produced an amazingly fast sort algorithm, but that no human could decipher how it worked. Call me crazy, but that's an example of something that simply should not be patentable.
At least I can rest easy in the knowledge that nanotech and AI-assisted design/engineering will probably negate the need for patents a few decades down the road anyway. Who needs a monopoly on an idea -- of human orgin or not -- once the rat race has ended and everyone is able to live like a king? (answer: only the regressively selfish--but that's a whole other rant.)
Power to the Peaceful
Anyway, Genetic Algorithms and GP - as many will know - rely on having a "fitness function", a function which we can stick in one of our candidates for evolution, and determine how fit they are. The more "fit" a candidate, the more chance we'll throw them into the breeding cycle.
Extreme Programming seems completely unrelated, but I think there's a novel connection. XP demands that the programmer write a Unit Test, a contrived "client" of the code they're actually writing, which tests that their implementation works. The beauty is that they can go "extreme" in changing their implementation, and the Unit Tests should continue to ensure that their code works in the context of the larger system.
But Unit Tests and Fitness Functions are amazingly similar. I'd love to see the Genetic Programming people get together with the Extreme Programming people -- all sorts of synergies could arise!
BrendanFor me the main message of this article is that what is 'human creativity' and what is 'mechanicial number crunching' is a moving target.
Remember when mere machines couldn't ... play grandmaster level chess ... prove geometry theorems .. add numbers together.
I've said it before (actually others said it first) but 'that which makes us human' is usually equivalent to 'that which we can't get a machine to do ... yet'.
And this technique will in time, I hope, collide head on with the patent system.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
that should be the first thing it comes up with if it's any good...
I'd rather keep my soul.
Anything that this array of GP computers can create by a process of natural selection must by definition be an obvious consequence of the basic building blocks. After all, no creative thought it being exercised here, just a purely mechanical process.
By this logic any and all software patents are a logical consequences of a particular configuration of nand gates and should not exist.
The primitive building blocks in GP are just those: primitive. Simple logical and arithmatical functions, loops, iterations, things a programmer needs. Configuring them is called programming and whether it is done by automatic means is irrelevant.
The stuff genetic programming produces is quite often highly non-obvious and takes an expert quite some creative thought to understand how it does what it does.
There is a point that should be stressed though. Genetic programming works by using inductive processes to find the answer. Inductive processes are creative by nature, this in contrast with deductive logic that is not creative at all (Cyc is the prototypical example).
If a machine arrives at an answer through deductive reasoning (theorem proving), then by definition it is a logical consequence of the inputs. Generate and test is however not deductive.
And please define the phrase 'creative thought' and while you're at it prove that it is not mechanical.
Table-ized A.I.
honestly, does it matter anyway? They are giving away patents left and right. Other countries don't accept them. They are basically worthless.
I say we need to do some work and improve the system before we start expoiting it.
This article must be one of the more fascinating I have read the last month. This might be due to my over worked imagination, but this seems like the idea of making computers do the work for us is taken to the next level. (oh long sentence)
One thing I am agains though are all those (b)anal patents around. Americans seem to be the worst, but Europe is getting there.
Why are they making the computers invent things to patent? I feel the reason for running this project is wrong. "Let's start a project so we can register loads of patents" should instead be "Let's start a project to benefit humanity"
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I agree. I think it would cut down on a lot of useless patents if companies needed a working implementation of something before they could patent it. I have heard of companies that had working implementations of things, but since they weren't first at the patent office, they were only allowed to stay in business during the one to two year period it took for the patentholder to actually figure out how to implement the patent.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
Exactly. Excuse me while I get a patent on all bit strings of length N.
It's about time the patent office had a DOS attack.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
This is actually correct, but beware of what governing bodies might do upon hearing cha-ching and seeing $$$. Here's a link to some excerpts of patent information. What is and not patentable. Patent Clips and notice the red text under "Inventions" near the bottom.
That's the real test.
The real question is whether they're going to try to pantent the idea of running a computer program to generate patentable ideas. That meta-patent would be the really valuable idea to come from this research.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Thats a meta-cluster.
But can they make a machine that'll come up with creative ways to train your wife for you?
Check out PriorArt.org -- they are collecting submissions from the community, for free, to create a database of prior art to combat absurd patents with.
It was created with the help of the Foresight Institute , which also runs a Slashdot-like interface at NanoDot.org .
(PS NanoDot appears to currently be down.)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Koza has a (controversial) patent on genetic programming.
Monoliths.
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light
The owner of a small consulting firm I used to work for patented a method of software assembly using genetic algorithms about two decades ago
It'd be in the public domain by now. The term for the patent monopoly was 17 years after the patent is granted or 20 years after it's filed; those are about the same because it typically takes 3 years to approve a patent.
Just thank goodness Sonny Bono[?] never touched patents.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If a computer can 'invent' something by simply extrapolating rules, the devices it produces are clearly not innovative and fail 'Obviousness' test.
Too bad I couldn't find an opening for an Open Source Zealot.
Maybe they could contest pending patent applications on grounds of obviousness, based on the inventions the computer managed to duplicate. Trouble is, their investors probably wouldn't support such an agenda.
I had a beowulf clu . . . er well anyway
"They have job openings for programmers. :-)"
The link is to a website that was last updated last November.
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Hello, I am God. I invented life, and therefore I am intending on patented it. Nevermind that it was 4 billion years ago and is kind of beyond the cut-off date, I'll just brib... donate money to my local senator to 'lobby' for a perminent extention. Nevermind that you'll all have to pay me to licence my "active-life" technology, remember, money talks. Nevermind whatever you have to do, remember, if I invented it, I own it! And the people who use it.
All your base will belong to me (oh, your base already do).
That's not how you do it. What you would do is feed vast amounts of text corresponding to pre-recorded speech... say... Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The fitness of the code is defined as an "audio hamming distance" between what the mutant code generated and the reference speech.
It might still have a problem sounding-out the word "teh" though. :-)
There's but one flaw in your logic. In order for people to copy and download everything, someone still has to buy the original. But wait, there's a way to get past that. Just STEAL the original and then let everyone download it...or is that going a little far?
Suppose we had a GNU project to do something similar; and published each and every solution which resulted - distributing this effort among thousands of GNU advocates.
That would be lovely. All that you would need to do is sort through the trillions of outputs to see if any of them were valuable.
This is a field test of an AI trial solution. The entirety of the attempt is to learn whether the GA is capable of coming up with inventions that are as sophisticated as those designed manually. If you stop using existing patents as the fitness function, you now need to have a method of learning which among the generated solutions is superior.
In the case of software patents, that means you need to be able to tell the computer what the ideal piece of software will do and how. That means, finally, that you have to detail every single part of the program before you can start evolving it. So, you might as well just write the code. You need to do this for every single piece of software you are trying to evolve.
Otherwise this would have already been done. What's more, if you want a complicated program, you'll probably need a lot more than a 1000-node cluster. Think about this, an evolutionary approach to Apache means that you would need to store in hard drive a large number of Apache prototypes which are in the process of evolving, then you would need to stress test these Apache prototypes one by one, and decide which one worked best. You would need to run a few hundreds of thousands of generations, minimum. That's a damn hell of a lot of processor usage.
Everything above may well be poorly-thought out / spelled. Blame the beer, not me.
Or, as the article puts it:
"I imagine we have done that but we don't know it," laughs Koza. To identify valuable, original results rather than simply matching patents, he explains, a human expert in the given field would need to evaluate tens of thousands of survivors.
In other words, it turns out that an infinite number of monkeys really will stumble into everything given infinite time. Frequently, solutions are simple -- it's identifying the need and fitting a solution to it that' s worthy of a patent.
I always thought that for something to be patented it had to be non obvious, and the product of creative thought.
Non-obvious, yes. More precisely unobvious to one with ordinary skill in the art.
Product of creative thought? No. Aside from the difficulty of coming up with a definition of something so metaphysical as 'creative thought', (an who can say this computer was not in fact engaging in such) there is specific language in the patent statutes that says the method of coming up with the patent is not to be considered when judging if the material is patentable. In other words, it's the result that counts, not how you got there. Sensibly pragmatic IMHO.
You sound just like an idealist to me though. ;-)
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
why should it matter how the solution was discovered? not that i'm for patenting everything, but person or machine - the idea is what matters
My server
I'm curious, since I know little about hardcore programming, about how you program this kind of thing... How does it run? Forever until forced quit? And how do you record the results? And what if you stop the program, and run it again, will it remember what answers it already found? Hmm, very interesting indeed... (OT) I wonder if a computer can learn how to play games as well as people using genetic programming... Heh I'm a firm believer that a computer can do things way better than people once taught. =P
- the "genes" to combine and cross,
- principles for mutating them, and
- domain models to simulate the effect of combining the genes in different ways (so you can give different the individuals [combinations of genes] heuristic performance scores and focus on mutating the better ones).
One developed conceptual system to start for physical process inventions is the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, TRIZ (from the Russian acronym).There's an academic and practice communinity around TRIZ, which you can find by searching for "TRIZ" on Google or looking at the TRIZ Journal.
The name "Invention-Machine" is taken. The Exact Science of Innovation is a brief background abstract from a founder of Invention Machine, Inc., which has developed process knowledge bases and search technology based on the TRIZ concepts.
I hope the first thing they did was patent the very idea of using genetic algorithms to search for new patentable algorithms.
If so, then they are definitely going to be rolling in dough soon...
When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, "To know one's self." And what was easy, "To advise another."
If you want more information on genetic programming, check out these articles posted on slashdot a couple days ago.
The fact that a machine can come up with patentable software only goes to show how banal most software patents are.
BH
Fools! They laughed at me at the Sorbonne...!
If the computer program can invent it by gradient descent, then it all becomes a race to see who can execute the most stuff the fastest to get there first.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
But that's only 57 characters...
if they ran a Beowulf cluster! Oh wait. Shit. Nevermind.
Actually for someone wanting to get on-the-job training, John is a pretty good employer - the productivity of his small teams has always been spectacular. For someone wanting to do a year's work before going on to a PhD at Stanford, I think he would be perfect.
This is not a signature.
Personally, I'm a bit annoyed with Koza.
He came and gave a talk about GP at UCI, so I went to see it. He gave an interesting song and dance about the great results they've gotten with it. I have no reason to doubt that the results are really good for some problem domains.
I got kind of excited about trying GP for a go engine, one of the hardest AI problems around. It's been tried once before, but I suspect the programmers didn't have that much domain-specific knowledge to help along the project.
What Koza didn't tell us, and what I didn't find out until I'd already invested a fair amount of time into studying GP, is this:
GP itself is patented.
So you can't really use GP as a way of coming up with patents to defend free software, unless you license the patent for GP.
BTW, I wrote Koza and asked him if I could use GP in a free software project for that go engine I was drooling about. I offered to split that $1M+ prize with him if I came up with something decent. He didn't even reply.
Okay, listen. The Genetic Algorythm is NOT merely the act of analysing absolutely everything that is possible. That is not feasable. It is not iteration, either. The GA is a process that sets very specific 'fitness' functions and models a limited set of variables that can be changed randomly in order to work towards the highest fitness possible. Each genetic (should be called evolutionary, but it seems that I have already lost that battle) program is usually tailored for a specific problem. If you think that you can write a program that models absolutely every possible invention, then go ahead and try. I have been working on a limited algorythm as a hobby project, and a decent fitness function is a very difficult creature to track down.
Everything above may well be poorly-thought out / spelled. Blame the beer, not me.
The owner of a small consulting firm I used to work for patented a method of software assembly using genetic algorithms about two decades ago... I think we'll all appreciate the irony if this company's software turns out to be covered by his patent.
One of the things that was not mentioned in the article and as far as I know never made it into Koza's writing is that for some of their older stuff, they came up with some particular patent so regularly that they started to write a patent avoidance filter.
What the thing does it take some existing patents and when the evolution hits on something that is close to it, the solution get punished for that. In think this is on par with patent invention, particularly as it seems you can circumvent any patent by just entering it in the machine and end up with a different device that circumvents it. Might be good idea for some GNU projects to have.
So, has someone patented the patent making machine?
"Man will cease to commit atrocities when he ceases to believe absurdities" --Voltaire
true, thats a better way, relize i was just trying to show an example of how you couldn't use GP for something.
maybe text to speach isn't a good example.
thanks,
-Jon
this is my sig.
Looks like someone came up with a machine that can come up with slashdot story submissions that have already been posted.
Haven't we read about this six times in the last month already?
I agree. A decade ago, I remarked in Koza's lunch discussion group that we're missing something in understanding how evolution works, and there's a Nobel Prize for whomever finds it. This sparked some interest, since the people in attendance were academic researchers. But a decade later, there's been no big insight.
Observing that most of the variety in biological evolution appeared during a short (in evolutionary terms) period, I have a speculation of my own. Perhaps during the period after viruses emerged, but before self/nonself recognizing immune systems, evolution worked much faster. With viruses to carry information around, some forms of evolution could take place during the organism's lifetime. This is vaguely plausible, but unconfirmed.
It's very frustrating trying to do AI via hill-climbing techniques. Almost invariably, you knock off some of the easy problems, then hit a wall. Your algorithm churns and churns but doesn't improve. Searching on a broad front, or introducing randomness, helps a little, but mostly just gets you out of local minima.
I tell people working on broad-front hill-climbing methods like genetic algorithms to validate them by comparing them against the two extremes - simple greedy hill climbing, and totally random search. If simple greedy hill-climbing works, you didn't need a GA or a neural net in the first place. If totally random search works, the search space is so small you don't need anything fancy.
I really have little-to-no clue about GA, although I tried to make something like this a couple of years back using x86 assembly. I believe the problem is ultimately one of processing power. Nature, as magnificent as it is, has tremendous computing power and detail. So, whatever we accomplish with our clunky serial/SMP processors (a tiny part of the universe) today is not comparable at all.
Nature being very flexible, could also speed up evolution by changing the evolving process itself. This is opposed to our computers and software, which remain pretty static.
However, just like you. I cannot really understand how everything has come to be just because of evolution. And if I can accept that I possess a mind, why shouldn't I be able to accept that there might be a bigger mind of some sorts behind the universe? To me, the essential building block of the universe seems to be consciousness - the dreamer. However, I'm perfectly aware that this only remains an idea/concept and shouldn't stop us from searching for more scientific or other spiritual answers.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
So if a computer is able to determine the algorithm, How can it be argued that this is not something that someone trained in the art would not come up with?
If someone could program a computer to iterate over possible solutions, this SHOULD NOT meet the requirements for Patentability.
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
Let's face it, if you can't put chains on it, if you can't put a fence around it, or lock it up in some manner, it does not belong to you. Software, ideas, drawings, music, plans, it makes no difference. Once you release it, it becomes like the air that we breathe. It belongs to nobody and to everybody.
The only way that IP laws will be enforceable in the age of the internet is to institute Orwellian laws whereby the governement is given fascist powers to spy on everybody. Already, hundreds of millions of copies of copyrighted software are being used freely around the world and there is nothing the manufacturers can do about it, short of instituting full blown fascism.
Wait a minute, aren't they doing that already? Aren't all ISPs in the US and Europe already keeping a log of all user activities? A government that finds it necessary to spy on its own people, not only does not deserve to last, but cannot possibly last. A house divided and all that...
Hit them where it hurt the most, the pocket book. It's our money that is being used to enact stupid laws like the DMCA. Without money, they have no power. There is only one solution against fascist IP laws: Download it all and copy it all! And use it all for free! Don't give them your money so they can turn around and use it against you.
Imagine it inventing a Beowulf cluster of itself! It ... it would ....
Dammit. Less coffee, more sleep.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
On the philosophical ground, these Stanford folks seem to have created a device capable of sifting the Akashic data banks. After all, where do these ideas come from? But like any chaotic concept, we reform it along the lines we expect to see.
So we have a machine that we can give a problem, and it will give us an answer, as long as we know what we want to hear.
This sounds an awful lot like most human-made software development (especially "community" development) in that it's really good at optimization, but it slows down significantly once new ground begins to be charted.
It of a conversation I recently had about this very idea- that GNU projects (GNOME was the example) tend to have this habit of just mulling around and looking funny for a long while before jelling into something usable- but once that happens, the thing created is a war-hardened program capable of getting the job done. Who knows, though, if it would have even existed had it not had previous environments' headlights to chase?
There's definitely a parallel here worthy of more observation.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
1. Is the US Patent DataBase available in some
sort of coded form where software or
algorithm structure can be matched? I can't
imagine the manual labor of going over
all the electronic patents and recoding
them into some sort of component/rules
based form suitable for easy matching -
and that's only the start.
2. The matching process sounds almost like
a search scheme based not on keywords
but on actual textual content - this
is the holy grail of AI and would crush
google and obsolete XML if anyone could
do it - but AFAIK no one is very close
to having a real general working
version of this.
There's a class of problems for which such algorithms work. And there are problems for which it doesn't do much. Koza's main contribution has been to find more useful problems for which this approach works. Analog circuit design is a good choice, because tweaking on circuit parameters and connections works in that domain.
Koza's system works on some of the same types of problems as Lenat's Eurisko, from 1978. Eurisko was a search system that worked on LISP S-expressions. It was used for simple program creation, digital circuit design, and trouncing humans in the Traveller strategy game. The basic concept was to take a representation of the solution, apply various plausible operations to it, and see what made things better. Many of the same concepts recur in genetic programming, although the search strategy is very different. Eurisko used heuristics thought to be clever. Genetic programming just bashes on the problem with compute power. (That's why Eurisko worked on a single time-shared DEC-10 and genetic programming needs a Beowulf cluster.)
It's worth noting that the re-invention of early electronic circuits is easy today because you can now use a simulator (typically SPICE) to test them. This makes automated brute-force searches possible.
It's not clear that this approach leads to strong AI. But it's a big hammer that can definitely crack some problems.
Solution checking yes! But machine problem-solving? Can't happen --- read Godel, Chaitan, Penrose ... may I repeat can't happen ... same as violating the 2nd Law. Machines create neither energy nor 'larger' algorithms.
Period. Stop.
I'm really surprised that everyone is so concerned about Koza's GA approach to invention. If you have been reading Scientific American, New Scientist, and Business Week, you will discover that I have been pioneering a unique kind of neural network system called a "Creativity Machine" that has been actively engaged in developing new inventions (some of which are now patented). Although many are accused of thinking with their genes, real invention comes from biological neurons. The Creativity Machine similarly invents using synthetic neurons. I guess that the Stanford Technology Transfer Office is vigorously marketing a technology that emulates the extremely slow, wasteful, and laborious processes of mutation and natural selection (genetic algorithms). To see a better way, go to http://www.imagination-engines.com.
So, what we end up with is another generation of computers; not to scan patents but to compare marketing strategies and come up with new ones which will do the best job of selling the crappy new stuff.
No doubt someone will eventually complain that their patent was actually infringed, and at that time we can look forward to lawyer-computers which will generate new legal strategies by comparing the best ones from the past...
Well, that's my conspiracy theory anyway.
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
Mind you, this makes the program slower by about a factor of 100.
Suppose we had a GNU project to do something similar; and published each and every solution which resulted - distributing this effort among thousands of GNU advocates.
These solutions could be used to blunt future patents based upon the resulting "prior art" from this effort. And software would be free to progress as it once did.
Anything that this array of GP computers can create by a process of natural selection must by definition be an obvious consequence of the basic building blocks. After all, no creative thought it being exercised here, just a purely mechanical process.
If so, those patents must have been granted in error (not an uncommon thing for the patent system), and so should be revoked immediately.
That goes for anything else that can be evolved in a similar way.
Maybe we have an automatic way of weeding the many bad patents out of the system. I wonder if the powers that be will be interested ...
Ok.. With a Quantum computer you can have your infinite number of monkeys. Now how about a quantum computer emulating an infinite number of quantum coumputers each emulating an infinite number of patentable solutions to a given problem. In other words... the integral of the space of all problem's spaces each problem with an integral of all possible solutions with filters as to patentablity. Patent all possible solutions to everything and shut down the patent offices as nothing else will ever be patentable! Of course you then need a "USEFUL" filter to see which ones should be implemented. Those against patents could do it first and publish making nothing new patentable!
Mind your own business.. I think moderators got brains too! :-) Maybe the guy that wrote this thinks he is funny, even though it has not much to do with the article... Everyone wants to own a 1000 node Beowulf cluster - let the poor guy wish :)
Find nice cocktail recipes @ www.spitzy.net
Bahh, I just woke up and it's to early for me to post.
About 2 years ago I started getting interested in genetic programming, all one had to do was define the problem well enough give the computers the right pieces and boom you have the next perfect speech to text engine, or Pac-man ghost logic.
The first think you'll realize when you get into this field is that there are two type of genetic programming; "Genetic Algorithms" and "Genetic Programming". The first is really just defining an answer set, like trying to re-arrange a DNA strand so it fits a certain criteria, the latter is actually having the computer create some "code" or an actual algorithm. Naturally I was more interested in "Genetic Programming".
The first thing I set out my test program to do was find an algorithm to find prime numbers, just a little test before I moved on to bigger and better things (like Pac-man ghost logic). I plugged in a few operations for the GP to work with, Add, Sub, Mul, Dev, Mod etc.. and gave it a fitness saying "your fit if you have an algorithm that given N you return Nth prime number". Well this didn't work.
The GP would come up with the most retarded algorithms; long lines of Add/Sub etc.. Some of them worked moderately well, all could have been reduced to a more finite set. Either way it wasn't going to work. The problem was that I needed to give the GP better tools then basic arithmetic, it needed for loops, if branches, variables! Maybe if I could figure out how to give the GP the right set of tools, and defined the problem we'll enough it could have gotten further.
You'll find GP successful in a limited range of problems. This is defined by the tools you can give them to work with, and by how well you can grade its "fitness. Fitness becomes very limited when the user most be evolved, imagine trying to have a GP come up with a good text to speech, ever time a new "generation" of code was produced you could have to personally grade the static garble it came out with.
-Jon
this is my sig.
im actually more interesting in the solutions they are coming up with rather than if the results are patentable. this does bring up quite a few interesting AI problems (solutions?) on making computers duplicate (or perhaps surpass) human problem-solving methods (kind of reminds me of wargames).
--Ks9
Hey, I'm f-ing bored, and it's only Wednesday. I bet my friend that I could post complete B.S. on /. and not get modded down. What do you think? Have a sense of humor? Mod me up. It's a good f-ing joke, and I might get 50 smackers out of it!
Which pays better? Which lets you eat and breed and produce new copies of yourself and your kind (geekoids)?
Apply GA. Which dominates in 50 generations - OS or MS?