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. :-)"

Comments

Work there? No thanks.

[Apuleius]

I'd rather keep my soul.

Well, yeah...

[update()]

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.

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.

Banalities

[Blackheart2]

The fact that a machine can come up with patentable software only goes to show how banal most software patents are.

By Definition, should not be Patentable.

[A Commentor]

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.