Patents are not required to cover implementation details, and in fact, it is not even required to lay out any detail of the mechanism. As an extreme example of

Patents are not required to cover implementation details, and in fact, it is not even required to lay out any detail of the mechanism. As an extreme example of this physicist Leo Szilard was granted a patent on nuclear chain reaction in 1936, three years before it was discovered scientifically. It was sufficient for the British patent office that if such a mechanism existed, it could release large amounts of energy. This may be an extreme example, but it illustrates that implementation details is not a requirement for a patent. This is also the case for a lot of software patents. They are broad enough to cover nearly anything, but not detailed enough to be useful as a description to build useful technology.