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Working Around Patents with Evolutionary Design
An anonymous reader writes "Using computational trial-and-error allowed a Stanford team to come up with a patent-free WiFi antenna. Patent rules are tricky to formulate as self-interest dictates that the claim is as general as possible. Patent fences effectively can build a substantive competitive barrier to markets. Using evolutionary tactics may be a way to legally and ethically bypass these roadblocks."
and then you patent the resulting design.
Intelligent design loses out yet again.
If X is the new Y, and Y is "X is the new Y", solve for X.
Its time to "fix" this problem by removing software and business methods from the purview of the patent office.
But who's to stop the person who wrote the algorithm to patent the solution that bypassed the original patent? Or the algorithm itself for that matter?
Efficient antennas 'designed' by evolution are already in use on spacecraft.
Patents were supposed to encourage innovation, but modern patent law has evolved in a way that makes it more of a hindrance than a help. You basically have to have a large corporation and a battery of lawyers behind you to support your patent application, and the corporations aren't even interested unless they are very sure they can see a path to big profits. For the corporations the big attraction is that the patent grants them monopoly profits, and they could not care less about the social values (or harms) of the innovations themselves. From that purely monetary perspective it makes perfect sense to focus on the value of patents for blocking competitors and for lawsuits--though SCO showed that the strategy doesn't always work.
I think the fundamental problem is that the values of patents are too highly variable, and this variability has completely overwhelmed the simple-minded idea of a temporary monopoly. There are cases where it makes sense to motivate innovation by the exclusive monopoly, but almost never for the specific period of time that is hard-coded into patent law. Some patents should lapse more quickly, though of course the companies will argue they should last *MUCH* longer, and they have a lot of lobbying money to push with. Some patentable ideas are very quick and inexpensive to develop, while others take years and lots of money, but patent law doesn't really consider such trivia.
The bottom line dynamic is that most innovation has to start within an individual, but patents have become a team sport. If you aren't on the right team, it doesn't really matter how innovative your ideas are. You're very unlikely to succeed at the patent game without such a team.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
While engineers are not actively designing the product, their jobs are still secure as the companies will always need someone to design the algorithms and to study the product goal to know what parameters to set for the algorithms.
The second concern is irrelevant, as engineers would still follow through with rigorous product testing to determine all the possible outcomes of the design, thus avoiding any unplanned problems.
The great value of these algorithms in producing ten to a hundred fold more efficient, faster, or longer lasting products will guarentee that their use will increase, creating a great demand for engineers who can work with them and who can expect high salary bonuses for such amazing results.
We are made wise not by the collection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future. -George Bernard Shaw
A friend of mine once told me that this is actually an intended result of patents. Note that a patent applies to a specific way of arriving at something, not the something itself. So, the idea is that if the something is desirable, others will go out of their way to find alternative ways to arrive at something. Some of these might be better than the original. Or new somethings may be encountered along the way (inventions tend to happen by accident, yada yada). Whatever the case, patents foster innovation...in this case, by shutting the door on using what is already known to work.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
"Using computational trial-and-error allowed a Stanford team to come up with a patent-free WiFi antenna. Patent rules are tricky to formulate as self-interest dictates that the claim is as general as possible. Patent fences effectively can build a substantive competitive barrier to markets. Using evolutionary tactics may be a way to legally and ethically bypass these roadblocks."
Two problems:
1. For the past 10+ years I keep seeing various articles talking about evolution design and they are all about antennas and simple analogue circuit designs. Antennas are certainly susceptible to evolutionary design, but if we'll be driving the industry forward we'll need to throw lots of R&D to develop evolutionary design algos that can design something more complex. My point is, it's hugely promising, but it's still not here in a big way.
2. The bigger problem, and which is what caused my exclamation in the title: there's no way to avoid overly broad patents. Evolutionary designs in fact often arrive at designs that match exactly various patents. Which means, when your super computer arrives at a working design, you still need to go through all the tedious work of verifying it's not patented, and if it is, start the algo again and hope for the best.
And the limit for rerunning the algo plenty of times to get patent-free design is the same such as manual design: we don't have infinite time, and the solutions to a problem are sometimes finite, and not that many.
I think patents should be left in place, but their running period should be shortened. The industry is developing at such an amazing pace that we make more progress in an year, than what took 10 years before. The original lawmakers never intended their law to run unmodified in such circumstances.
> A century and a half after Darwin suggested natural selection as the mechanism of evolution, engineers have proved him right once again.
I would challenge the assertion that entering the design parameters and working out which is the best result isn't proof of the origin of the species suggested by Darwin.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Perhaps they'll be blocked by Koza's patents on genetic programming.
Just means the orginal patent they were trying to circumvent wasnt drawn up properly.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
this is nonsense. In the theory of evolution data is mostly lost and note gained so function is lost and not gained. The only time data is added is with some sort of fluke mutation in which case the mutation alone will not help and so will be cast aside (according to evolution). This is known as irreducibly complex and is one of the biggest arguments from many scientists against evolution or at least against the standard theory of evolution. The evolution that happens here is closely monitored and designed around certain criteria in order to reach a certain goal. The person who wrote the article is obviously expressing his own views and not those of a an unbiased journalist when he says at the end that this clearly proves darwin right once again. Indeed I doubt leading evolutionist scientists would care to relate these two barely related forms of evolution.
Patent law has not "evolved". It has been maliciously twisted and distorted by corporate interests. That is a very different thing.
And if you want it to stay anywhere near halfway sane, write your Senators and tell them to vote against their new "patent reform" bill. That would change the law to award patents to the first who apply for a patent, rather than the first to invent. Talk about stifling innovation! That would give all the advantages to corporate lawyers, and our patent system would fail completely in its purpose.
nonsense back to you.
genetic mutation comes in several forms, some are more common than others and sometimes the sequence being mutated can affect the rate of its own mutation (and even this can happen either biochemically or by following genetic instructions that affect mutation rate).
1. Point mutations.
Clearly you've heard of this--this is what you are colloquially referring to as "mutation". This is gain, loss or replacement of a single base. Due to the degenerate nature of the triplet code, most replacement point mutations that occur within a gene are effectively silent, not causing any change in the resulting protein. Of course, many more happen outside the coding regions of genes and typically do nothing. When the point mutation causes a change to the amino acid sequence, the protein still might not be affected. If the amino acid substitution of the same type (e.g., both hydrophobic or both acidic) the protein function might be unaltered. Or it might be impreceptibly altered. This creates very important variety in proteins that allows an individual in changing circumstances to adapt. Of course, sometimes, and maybe most often, the protein performs worse. If it's bad enough, that mutation is removed from the gene pool along with the individual possessing it.
Insertion and deletion of a single base is very similar to the next category, so I'll discuss them there.
2. Insertion and deletion of 1 or more bases.
This is a real problem for genes. If the insertion or deletion is a multiple of 3, then there's a chance nothing will happen but 1 amino acid will be gained or lost, but potentially not affecting the function of the protein. But there's also a good chance the protein will be severely altered, because from the mutation onward, the frame of 3-bases per amino acid will be off, and now you'll end up with a completely different string of amino acids. Chances are they'll do nothing, but sometimes they do something. If the protein is lost completely, then there may or may not be a problem to the organism. You've got two copies of most genes, and the second copy might be able to compensate for the bad protein. If so, this becomes what people call a recessive mutation, meaning if you've only got 1 "bad" allele, you're all right, but if both alleles are "bad" you suffer. Sometimes the truncated protein is worse than missing, though. Sometimes the shortened form works well enough to go through all the motions of being a protein (going where needed, binding to its partners, etc.) but then fails to carry out its job and at the same time interferes with the "normal" copy. This becomes what we call a dominant mutation and it's really bad news. Insertions or deletions are fairly common in certain types of sequences but for the most part, the quality control machinery can catch them and fix or destroy the aberrant cell.
3. Translocation and duplication events.
This is a specialized type of insertion, in which a whole section of DNA is either extracted and inserted elsewhere, or copied and the copy is inserted elsewhere. Extraction-insertion is not necessarily a problem, since you've got a net gain of 0 new sequence. The gene is still present and probably still functions normally, it just lives in a different location now. Sometimes this is a problem, if it is translocated without its regulatory machinery, so that now it doesn't activate at the right time or make the proper dose of protein. Sometimes the regulation is only slightly tweaked, again allowing for a slight variation of the protein function in an organism, which can be useful when the population is facing novel or changing conditions. Sometimes this causes cancer.
With duplication, evolution is most free to act in a good way. This is the wholesale copying and inserting of the copy in a new place. Often the new copy is put next to the original, but not always. With two fully functioning copies of the same gene, a rendundancy is built in, superior to the one created by having two alleles (one on each chromosome). Later
Patent trolls usually patent general quite obvious things. GP tend to evolve actually innovative things. If they did it, they would get some good designs rather than the very general noninnovative designs that qualifies them as trolls. However, it is quite true that after getting a good design via GP you can patent it.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.