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

well...

[mgebbers]

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

this is news?

[Anonymous Coward]

John Koza has been working on this stuff for 10 years - I can go down to my local Borders (in Australia) and buy "Genetic Programming III".

The idea of patenting genetically evolved systems (electronic circuits as well as software) has been around for as long as academics needed to justify this research to funding bodies.

Please Slashdot, get rid of this looser Michael and find editorial staff who know what news is.
</rant>

Re:michael

[Anonymous Coward]

Well ask him for a date and hot gay anal sex!

XP would be useful here!

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:michael

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it physical or just platonic love?

You should mail him and tell this Michael about your feelings. After a while you might actually meet, have a nice dinner and look where it all leads.

Re:michael

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, post here what you'd like to do with Michael.

Maybe it'll help.

Is it an fp? Is it true?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh Joy.

ATTENTION MODERATORS

[Anonymous Coward]

FAG DETECTED

Mod down please, thanks.

ATTENTION MODERATORS

[Anonymous Coward]

This AC's still at zero. Quit slacking off and mod him -1.

Re:Can this be used against software patents.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotta hand it to you, that would be a lot easier than their idea, to have someone read through all of the dumb ideas to evaluate them for patentability.

Damn!

[Anonymous Coward]

But can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of Beowulf clusters?

pf

[Anonymous Coward]

we don't need no patents

but...

[Anonymous Coward]

They have a 1000-node beowulf cluster. That's cool. Who cares about that "patents are evil" drivel anymore?