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Patent Invention Machines

Posted by michael on from the just-what-we-needed dept.

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. :-)"

2 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. well... by mgebbers · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    for (int i = 0; ;i++) {
    submit_patent_request(i + "click patenting");
    }
    that wasn't so hard :)

  2. XP would be useful here! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    This is very cool stuff. Genetic Programming definitely seems to be coming along well. It's a very recent field - when I did my undergrad honours paper in 1994 there had only been papers published for a few years beforehand.

    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!

    Brendan