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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. :-)"
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.
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.