Slashdot Mirror
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. :-)"
I'd rather keep my soul.
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"
Find nice cocktail recipes @ www.spitzy.net
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.
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.
If you want more information on genetic programming, check out these articles posted on slashdot a couple days ago.
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
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
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.