Dean Kamen Awarded Patent For Robot Competition Rules

An anonymous reader writes "Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway and the founder of the FIRST Robotics Competition has been granted Patent 7,507,169, that describes one of the previous competitions. The main invention is a ranking system that ranks teams not only on their score, but their opponents' score, so teams are rewarded for helping their opponents score more. It is claimed that this ranking system promotes the made up phrases 'coopertition' and 'gracious professionalism.' It had three rejections, and even more appeals, before finally being accepted six years after the first application. While a majority of his 130 patents are for things related to his inventions, which are as diverse as medical equipment, unique uses for Stirling engines, and transportation, this one seems a little dubious. Dean opposes the Patent Reform Act of 2009, which would make it easier to overturn patents after they are granted."

Comments

Dubious patent still.

[JavaManJim]

How would this compare or limit other sports like a team shooting match where individuals and teams have scores?

Then this patent mimics basic biology where individual and cooperative behavior is honored. Say a bacteria that reproduces wildly that's individual performance. Then that bacterial produces a toxin that helps other bacterial thrive by eliminating competition. That's team help.

I think the guy is just patent crazy and has a blank space on his honor wall.

 

Mod subject interesting

[tiananmen tank man]

"Dean opposes the Patent Reform Act of 2009, which would make it easier to overturn patents after they are granted" ... Just like the guy (Victor Hugo?) who brought to life copyright and its terms of death+ years, he was old and had a lot of writings and had 4 children ... lots to gain from copyright.

Wait, wait, wait...

[Anonymous Coward]

You cannot copyright a game, but you are allowed to patent the rules? For shame!

Bad Patent for a Bad Invention

[Kaboom13]

As a former FIRST competitor, I can say that the consensus of 99% of the students HATED the retarded attempts at enforcing sportsmanship by silly tricks like the winner gets the losers score x3 in qualifying points. Combined with a completely broken randomization system (they tried to maximize the time teams had to recuperate between rounds, but the result was same handful of teams were in the random "pool" to pull from every round.) ensured the top seeded teams for the playoffs was practically random. It also made for what in my opinion was the most humiliating thing, where the winning team would have their opponent soundly beat, and would stop scoring for themselves and start scoring for their opponents. Any scoring and ranking system that makes College Football look fair and accurate is so flawed it should probably be patented and buried deep just so no one else can copy it.

Re:Bad Patent for a Bad Invention

[dfenstrate]

This seems to be an extension of the last 30 years of defective parenting techniques- specifically, everyone's a winner and no one loses.

The 'theory' have given us the latest, and most reviled, generation to enter the workplace: The 'millenials,' widely know for both a sense of entitlement and shirking individual responsibility for results.

Obviously it's not universal to everyone in that age group, but ask anyone who's been hiring for decades- all generations have their quirks. The latest are the worst.

Kamen's silly ideas in this area shows the limits of his otherwise able intellect.

Re:Bad Patent for a Bad Invention

[loxosceles]

Ideally that's true, but in practice sponsoring companies with vast robotics experience will on average wipe the floor with everyone else.

That's not to say that FIRST is stupid. Students do learn something about robotics, but they'd learn a lot more with simpler tasks that don't require a large team to get anything done. Smaller tasks means smaller teams which means more individual contribution.

My experience with FIRST every year I was in high school went like this: A bunch of idiots from my school and a bunch of idiots from our sponsoring company (which didn't make anything even remotely resembling robots, they designed fairly static electronic and mechanical equipment) came up with the most unreliable, easy-to-break robots imaginable. They overruled the few people who had the audacity to point out that "Hey, maybe something more reliable would be better." (The typical response was, "This isn't unreliable, we can make it work.")

Once our "team" settled on a design each year, it was very depressing watching frantic attempts to get the thing to work right. Enormous amounts of time and effort went into correcting major problems with the robot designs.

Perhaps I'm jaded, but if students want to learn robotics, FIRST is not a good place to start. With one exception... if you know you want to do embedded systems design or programming for robotics, then you can focus on that part and do the best you can with the robot everyone else comes up with. That is valuable. The mechanical engineering aspect of FIRST robots is simply dependent on too many factors (idiots on the team, skill of corporate sponsor) for it to be very valuable as an engineering learning experience.

Not new idea, see resistance points in rankings

[s-whs]

In rankings for chess (used elsewhere too), resistance points are used to break deadlocks when people have scored the same. This is mostly of use in incomplete competitions as when everyone plays everyone, the results of this are far less important because true playing strength will eventually come out.

When I was programming reversi/othello programs ca. 1985-1989 I saw a phenomenon where in e.g. a field of 12 programs, and 6 games each program played, ranking by points was sometimes grossly unjust, so I decided to experiment with a matrix multiplication method where a matrix of results * vector of players strengths should give the player 's strength again and one could (hopefully) iteratively obtain the right values. This had the problem of some values converging to zero, but the idea was ok (strength from a certain iteration on gave the right intuitive results where players with higher scores could still be ranked lower because they mainly played lesser opponents. I never worked it out such that it always worked. The idea seemed (and still seems) right though.

Anyway, this sort of idea seems the same as Kamen's, namely that ones score gets higher the higher the opponents score. This is again obvious from thinking about a limited number of rounds, and thinking of resistance points, so I cannot understand why anyone should be able to patent this. It may not be obvious to a layman, but if you dive into ranking stuff, this idea is not an invention.

Then again, perhaps my idea in the 1980s was invention worthy :)

That's PageRank

[tepples]

I decided to experiment with a matrix multiplication method where a matrix of results * vector of players strengths should give the player 's strength again and one could (hopefully) iteratively obtain the right values.

Did you use or describe this method publicly prior to 1998? If so, what you did could help invalidate the PageRank patent.

Re:That's PageRank

[s-whs]

That's PageRank

Really? So I jest my idea might be worth a patent, and it was ;-)

I decided to experiment with a matrix multiplication method where a matrix of results * vector of players strengths should give the player 's strength again and one could (hopefully) iteratively obtain the right values.

Did you use or describe this method publicly prior to 1998? If so, what you did could help invalidate the PageRank patent.

Well, I did the following in 1988 (or perhaps early 1989): I went to visit someone I hadn't seen in a long time, and told him about some things that interested me such as programming Reversi/Othello. I took with me various docs including a page from HCC nieuwsbrief (dutch computer club magazine) about a tournament for Reversi programs (from 1987 IIRC, I still have the magazine so I can check and scan it so everyone can see why I thought normal ranking wasn't good enough but that something like resistance-points (=sum of points of the opponent) should be included in some way) and I asked him:

"What do you think about the ranking of these programs?"

He studied them for a bit, and concluded, as I did, that one of the higher ranked programs should be ranked lower. I then explained my idea. If that sort of thing is considered making it public, and enough to invalidate a patent, then yes, I did mention it publicly. I'm not sure in how much detail I went about explaining it, for example the iterations (stopping after a certain number gave good results, but convergence was not an option as I mentioned about. This was also why I didn't use exact methods to find the eigenvector.

But you need to remember: this was ca. 21 years ago, I think I still have the papers/calculations somewhere with my ideas for the reversi program (evaluation functions etc.), but I will have to dig it all out. Perhaps I don't have it any more. I doubt people I discussed it with will have remembered... Also, I didn't publish in a magazine or something like that, as it just seemed too trivial. If I had had internet access at the time, I might have published the idea then via say email .

But even if I can find the papers again, then there still wouldn't be much proof of 'public' description as the people I told it to probably don't remember it.

I will think about it some more (whom I told it to etc.) and try to dig up what I wrote down at the time.

Re:He "opposes the patent reform act"

[pjt33]

Forget obviousness. Aren't patents supposed to have industrial application?