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

Re:By Definition, should not be Patentable.

[rgmoore]

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?

Actually, it sounds as though a substantial part of the cleverness of their system is that it focuses on areas that are notoriously difficult for people to come up with good answers. They mention specifically that they've looked mostly at areas that are viewed as being black arts- i.e. areas where the most reliable approach for human inventors is trial and error. That means that essentially nothing in those fields is obvious, even to experts in the field, so just about everything is patentable.

We evolved it first! Nah-nah!

[Saeger]

Here's a compromise for those who want to patent emergent solutions: useful GeneticAlg output should be allowed to be patented, but only if a human can also understand it; that includes the means and the ends. That's only fair, since patents were meant to reward human ingenuity in the first place, not some multi-million dollar darwin cluster breeding the shape of a square peg into a round hole.

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.)

Fascinating and scary

[roxytheman]

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"

Patent circumvention device

[NoOneInParticular]

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.

Is anything from this patentable ???

[sane?]

I always thought that for something to be patented it had to be non obvious, and the product of creative thought.

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 ...

gp and ga

[jon_c]

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

as if we didnt have enough patents already...

[invictus]

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).