Google Wants Patent On Splitting Restaurant Bills

theodp writes "In a classic example of parody coming to life," writes GeekWire's Todd Bishop, "a newly published patent filing reveals Google's ambitions to solve one of the most troublesome challenges known to humanity: Splitting the bill at the end of a meal." In its patent application for Tracking and Managing Group Expenditures, Google boasts that the invention of six Googlers addresses 'a need in the art for an efficient way to track group expenditures and settle balances between group members' by providing technology that thwarts 'group members [who] may not pay back their entire share of the bill or may forget and not pay back their share at all.'

Comments

Bistromathics

[BeerCat]

I think Douglas Adams worked this one out a while back:

http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Bistromathics

The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the check, the cost of each item, the number of people at the table and what they are each prepared to pay for.

You'd have thought that Google, of all people, would have checked to see whether there was an app for that already...
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=restaurant+bill+app

Not a problem in a lot of places . . .

[PolygamousRanchKid]

In a lot of places in Europe, the waiter/waitress does it for you. Like in Germany, for example.