7 ms·

Patent: Artificial Intelligence System

46 points by lumberjack 13y ago

lumberjack 13y ago
I feel really insecure posting this but I have to ask: isn't this patent a little bit too reaching and isn't the logic a little bit too obvious to be worthy of patent? Or are my feelings of insecurity justified and I am truly too ignorant to recognize the intricacies and complexities laid down in that sea of text?
- yulaow 13y ago
  Welcome to the nonsense of the U.S. patent world.
- daveid 13y ago
  You're not alone in thinking that having that concept patented is actually kind of... outrageous.
- shmerl 13y ago
  It's not news that there are tons of broad patents of ridiculous nature which obviously have prior art.
  - axman6 13y ago
    But this isn't a broad patent, it's in fact very specific in its claims, and no one here has managed to provide anything that resembles prior art for this patent. You should stop making ridiculous claims without any proof or facts to back them up.
    - shmerl 13y ago
      You are being ridiculous. I worked with a similar system during my CS studies. I.e. artificial intelligence analysis of natural language input. Patenting such old known ideas is pure lunacy. Anyway, I view patenting such ideas as ridiculous even if they weren't known before. Such abstractions simply should be unpatentable.
      - axman6 13y ago
        Got a citation that has all the features of even the first claim? That's all that's needed. The patent doesn't claim a system which does analysis of natural language input, it claims a specific system for doing such. Again, find a citation and prove it isn't novel or inventive. Until then, why should anyone consider it invalid? The law must work on proof, not people saying "Oh yeah, I've totally done that before, trust me". If it's so obvious, then it should be easy to find a citation. Also, why should inventive ideas in software be any less valuable and worthy of protection as inventive ideas for physical objects? This patent protects a very narrow scope, anything that infringed it would have to perform all the steps in the first claim and it seems to me that it wouldn't be too hard to design a similar system which doesn't infringe. It might not be dissimilar enough to get you a patent, but it also wouldn't infringe.
        shmerl 13y ago
        Also, why should inventive ideas in software be any less valuable and worthy of protection as inventive ideas for physical objects? Why don't you go further with your logic. Why inventive math theories can't be patentable? Or may be abstract information theory itself? You can make it absurd by pushing the border in that direction. I draw the line at the point which excludes software and algorithms from patentability. Besides the theoretical aspect of what should be patentable, there is a very pragmatic one, which was already brought many times, and all software patent proponents pretend that it doesn't exist - patent thickets. In case of hardware they aren't a major risk, but in case of software they are completely unavoidable and tend to be horrifically tense. It's a good enough of a reason to render software unpatentable, since in the case of software the patents don't serve their purpose, instead of promoting innovation, they stifle it. Whether you like it or not, that's how it works. Europe had enough common sense to forbid software patentability, but US didn't.
- walid 13y ago
  Actually by just scanning through the text I only find a lot of AI rehashing and nothing new.
- yohui 13y ago
  No, I think this looks vacuous as well. I also wonder why claims 14 and 15 appear to repeat claims 12 and 13 verbatim, except for one comma. Does that change the meaning somehow?
kevinpet 13y ago
The "inventor" appears to be head of a small defense sub-contractor. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/cognitivecode http://www.crunchbase.com/company/cognitivecode Note that the patent has not been issued. I certainly hope that this gibberish isn't taken to be sufficient details for someone to implement.
- lumberjack 13y ago
  >Note that the patent has not been issued. Thanks for pointing that out. I read the whole thing (surprisingly an easy read as far as patents go) and somehow missed the most important part. Does this mean that it is still in process or was it a failed application?
  - yoda_sl 13y ago
    Probably not yet reviewed
- ewang1 13y ago
  This patent was issued on 2/28/2012. It's the related application that hasn't been issued.
walid 13y ago
The sentence: The method of claim 1 wherein the user is a computer. describes polymorphism in OOP. Way to go!
jandrewrogers 13y ago
There are hundreds of patents on "artificial intelligence". All of them are worthless gibberish. Labeling something "artificial intelligence" does not make it so, and the patent office has little interest in what you label the invention as long as you describe the process in a manner that meets their criteria for patentability.
yoda_sl 13y ago
It is not yet a patent: it has been filed but there is no patent number and no patent issue dates. You can find tons of such patent pending for reviews.
- mooneater 13y ago
  Thanks yoda_sl, most everyone seemed to miss this obvious point
- gweinberg 13y ago
  Its patent number is 8,126,832 and its issue date is Feb 28 2012. Related application 60893237 has no patent number or issue date, is that what you are looking at?
loup-vaillant 13y ago
Muhaha, patent all you like, it won't protect you from the intelligence explosion (you know, that AI that turns itself into Skynet before the Patent Office can strike it down). On a more serious note, I'm glad I'm living in a country where there's no such thing as infringing software patents.
TheMagicHorsey 13y ago
Software patents are utter garbage. We all know that. Most software patent attorneys know that. The system has evolved to keep lawyers employed. It is a way of taxing engineers to support lawyers. The plaintiffs need lawyers. The defendants need lawyers. There must be judges. The entire system gets weighted down with this huge load of unproductive individuals. Think of how many engineers become patent attorneys because law is so lucrative. Entry level patent attorneys in firms make $160K a year. Think of how little an engineer makes even four or five years out of college. Its more lucrative to patent and sue, than to build. These are the little things that are going to erode America's competitiveness.
- josephagoss 13y ago
  I agree, I even know a friend who was studying computer science but moved over to law, his reasoning was how manipulating the law gives you a advantage over other people. The same is in Australia, our society values lawyers and they ruin almost everything. Make no mistake, many lawyers would see the world burn just to make a bigger buck. Many of them truly don't care.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    My experience is that law is like programming. The people who are making the "bigger buck" genuinely love their profession and take it seriously. The ones who only turned up for the bigger bucks quit because it bores and frustrates them. Not to mention, lawyers are held to the standard of fiduciary duty. That's fairly heavy duty.
  - d5tryr 13y ago
    That's a courageous and bold statement to make. Apart from the weasel words that entirely undermine it. If you want to say that all lawyers are evil, without any evidence, at least have the conviction to say that. If you want to imply that some undefined minority, or possible majority, of lawyers may, or may not, potentially be paid arsonists, but might also not be arsonists, paid or otherwise, then... I dunno, maybe say something worthwhile instead.
woodchuck64 13y ago
Forbes article with some background, http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2012/07/09/riding-the-wave-of-artificial-intelligence/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2012/07/09/riding... The incredibly banal Kato Kaelin interviews Leslie Spring and Mimi Chen (at about 7:30 minutes) http://www.tubeguru.com/video/9311 http://www.tubeguru.com/video/9311 Are these two musicians, vocalists, or founders of cutting edge AI Cognitive Code Corporation? Or ALL of the ABOVE??
jacques_chester 13y ago
I worked out one reason why software patents are so terribly troublesome versus patents for physical mechanisms. Because we deal in abstractions. You can always take this piece of code you wrote and notice that it can be abstracted to solve a class of problems. And then that this class of problems is in turn a subclass of a larger set of problems. And then it's increasingly vague all the way down. Before long your patent application transforms from "Method to improve page retrieval on ARM7 CPUs" to "Method to improve caching in memory" to "Method to improve caching" to "Method to accelerate any computation". That generally doesn't happen in the physical world, because physical inventions aren't easily generalisable. You can't take a tractor and, with a few lines of code, abstract it into a platonic ideal that can also spit out cars, buses, trains, planes, ships and the starship Enterprise.
noonespecial 13y ago
I'm thinking that once you've got a patent on strong AI, you more or less have a patent on everything. It's a method and process for doing, well, everything a human ever could or would do.
coopdog 13y ago
So how can we / could we have stopped this patent. Is there an easy online way to submit prior art for patents under consideration? That way all the reviewer has to do is accept the prior art and nuke the application
- axman6 13y ago
  Do you have any prior art? This is not a patent for "Artificial intelligence" in general, it's a patent for a very specific method of doing something that appears intelligent, and this is actually what artificial intelligence is all about. See my comment above to see what is required for something to be relevant prior art. Basically, you're not going to find it. And who cares anyway, the scope of the claims is really quite narrow, it's going to take a lot of effort for someone to actually come up with a system which infringes this patent without having read the thing in the first place.
  - VikingCoder 13y ago
    > my AI background is weak > it's going to take a lot of effort for someone First, you assert that you are not an expert in AI. Then you assert how much effort would be required to independently come up with the same implementation. You have to chose which of those two assertions to make.
    - axman6 13y ago
      My AI background is weak but not non-existant. But this is beside the point. I'm not the one making claims this is a junk patent and that it's clearly obvious. The ones who are have provided no proof that it is obvious. For a patent to be invalid, there must be proof, you can't just say "oh clearly it's obvious" because you can say that about anything at all once you know the solution to the problem. Regarding my comment on how much effort it would take, I was stating my opinion that it, at face value, doesn't seem obvious to me. But the assertion that it is obvious and a terrible patent is something that can be proven with a single link, but no one has provided one. And I believe the reason for this is because the naysayers have no idea what they're talking about and are too ignorant to know that just because the term artificial intelligence is used does not mean that they are claim all artificial intelligence systems conceivable to man, but merely the system they have invented. By all means, prove me wrong, find a citation that shows this is either not new or is obvious, but until you do, the patent stands as a valid patent. Any citation you find I'd be more than happy to look through and see whether it is a suitable citation, but until then, the naysayers haven't a leg to stand on.
axman6 13y ago
"Software patents are utter garbage" " I certainly hope that this gibberish isn't taken to be sufficient details for someone to implement." "isn't this patent a little bit too reaching and isn't the logic a little bit too obvious to be worthy of patent?" It's very clear from basically every single comment on this story that most of you have no clue about the patent system nor what to actually look for when sizing up a patent. I've picked just a few comments that demonstrate the general ignorance that can be seen here (this is not an insult, but people need to understand when they do not understand something and aren't qualified to comment). I'd love for someone to reply with a citation that shows that just claim 1 is not novel, or is not inventive. To meet this criteria, the citation must either disclose ALL THE FEATURES LISTED IN THE CLAIM or it must be OBVIOUS to produce SOMETHING EXACTLY AS CLAIMED based on one or more PRIOR ART documents. It is not sufficient that all the features be in a single citation, but it must be obvious to actually come to the same invention AS CLAIMED. So if someone could please find for me one or more citations which combined (and under Australian law it must be obvious to do so) which contains: A method for a computer system to interpret an input from a user and generate a response, comprising: 1) receiving a user input; 2) converting the user input into an input array comprising rows and columns having a plurality of concepts; 3) determining if any of the plurality of concepts in the input array is derived from a root concept; 4) if any of the plurality of concepts is derived from a root concept, replacing each such derived concept with the corresponding root concept, identifying one or more related concepts that relate to the root concept, and generating a multi-dimensional array based on the input array that includes the one or more related concepts; 5) generating one or more additional multi-dimensional arrays, based on the input, containing any composite concepts, each derived from two or more concepts contained in the original array; 6) marking one or more concepts in the multi-dimensional arrays as essential based on application-specific criteria; 7) correlating a plurality of concepts in the multi-dimensional array to a plurality of first elements in a database by comparing a plurality of linear arrays derived from the multidimensional array to the plurality of elements in the database, wherein the first elements in the database includes a link to a second element in the database do not comprise possible responses; 8) determining a plurality of possible responses to the user input based on the correlation of the multi-dimensional array and the plurality of elements in the database 9) and generating a response to the user input. There's 9 broad concepts here, and to my knowledge, at least 3, 4, 5 and 7 seem non-obvious to me, but my AI background is weak. Even if they are known, is it known to combine ALL those features in the way claimed? I'd be surprised if it were, the USPTO is actually quite good at searching in general. It's so depressing to see a forum of people who are supposed to be intelligent and rational jumping to their guns at the mere mention of the word patent. Of course there are some junk patents, but those few should not be used to devalue the work done by inventors big, small or individuals around the world. If you don't even know how to read a patent, why do you feel like you're qualified to comment on their validity? We don't discredit academic papers because we've seen some of the words in their titles before, so why should patents be any different? It's dishartening to see such ignorance almost encouraged on Hacker News.
e3pi 13y ago
Trade Secret. If you've a worthy AI engine/algorithmic break-through, software has the hugely greater advantage over physical inventions by securing it behind the API front-end. Nothing gained by filing a patent and everything to lose.
coldarchon 13y ago
The USA have to review their patent system for software or VERY soon Europe and the rest of the world are going to ignore ANY patent from USA ..

46 points by lumberjack 13y ago

I feel really insecure posting this but I have to ask: isn't this patent a little bit too reaching and isn't the logic a little bit too obvious to be worthy of patent? Or are my feelings of insecurity justified and I am truly too ignorant to recognize the intricacies and complexities laid down in that sea of text?

yulaow 13y ago
Welcome to the nonsense of the U.S. patent world.
daveid 13y ago
You're not alone in thinking that having that concept patented is actually kind of... outrageous.
shmerl 13y ago
It's not news that there are tons of broad patents of ridiculous nature which obviously have prior art.
- axman6 13y ago
  But this isn't a broad patent, it's in fact very specific in its claims, and no one here has managed to provide anything that resembles prior art for this patent. You should stop making ridiculous claims without any proof or facts to back them up.
  - shmerl 13y ago
    You are being ridiculous. I worked with a similar system during my CS studies. I.e. artificial intelligence analysis of natural language input. Patenting such old known ideas is pure lunacy. Anyway, I view patenting such ideas as ridiculous even if they weren't known before. Such abstractions simply should be unpatentable.
    - axman6 13y ago
      Got a citation that has all the features of even the first claim? That's all that's needed. The patent doesn't claim a system which does analysis of natural language input, it claims a specific system for doing such. Again, find a citation and prove it isn't novel or inventive. Until then, why should anyone consider it invalid? The law must work on proof, not people saying "Oh yeah, I've totally done that before, trust me". If it's so obvious, then it should be easy to find a citation. Also, why should inventive ideas in software be any less valuable and worthy of protection as inventive ideas for physical objects? This patent protects a very narrow scope, anything that infringed it would have to perform all the steps in the first claim and it seems to me that it wouldn't be too hard to design a similar system which doesn't infringe. It might not be dissimilar enough to get you a patent, but it also wouldn't infringe.
      - shmerl 13y ago
        Also, why should inventive ideas in software be any less valuable and worthy of protection as inventive ideas for physical objects? Why don't you go further with your logic. Why inventive math theories can't be patentable? Or may be abstract information theory itself? You can make it absurd by pushing the border in that direction. I draw the line at the point which excludes software and algorithms from patentability. Besides the theoretical aspect of what should be patentable, there is a very pragmatic one, which was already brought many times, and all software patent proponents pretend that it doesn't exist - patent thickets. In case of hardware they aren't a major risk, but in case of software they are completely unavoidable and tend to be horrifically tense. It's a good enough of a reason to render software unpatentable, since in the case of software the patents don't serve their purpose, instead of promoting innovation, they stifle it. Whether you like it or not, that's how it works. Europe had enough common sense to forbid software patentability, but US didn't.
walid 13y ago
Actually by just scanning through the text I only find a lot of AI rehashing and nothing new.
yohui 13y ago
No, I think this looks vacuous as well. I also wonder why claims 14 and 15 appear to repeat claims 12 and 13 verbatim, except for one comma. Does that change the meaning somehow?

kevinpet 13y ago

The "inventor" appears to be head of a small defense sub-contractor. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/cognitivecode http://www.crunchbase.com/company/cognitivecode Note that the patent has not been issued. I certainly hope that this gibberish isn't taken to be sufficient details for someone to implement.

lumberjack 13y ago
>Note that the patent has not been issued. Thanks for pointing that out. I read the whole thing (surprisingly an easy read as far as patents go) and somehow missed the most important part. Does this mean that it is still in process or was it a failed application?
- yoda_sl 13y ago
  Probably not yet reviewed
ewang1 13y ago
This patent was issued on 2/28/2012. It's the related application that hasn't been issued.

walid 13y ago

The sentence: The method of claim 1 wherein the user is a computer. describes polymorphism in OOP. Way to go!

jandrewrogers 13y ago

There are hundreds of patents on "artificial intelligence". All of them are worthless gibberish. Labeling something "artificial intelligence" does not make it so, and the patent office has little interest in what you label the invention as long as you describe the process in a manner that meets their criteria for patentability.

yoda_sl 13y ago

It is not yet a patent: it has been filed but there is no patent number and no patent issue dates. You can find tons of such patent pending for reviews.

mooneater 13y ago
Thanks yoda_sl, most everyone seemed to miss this obvious point
gweinberg 13y ago
Its patent number is 8,126,832 and its issue date is Feb 28 2012. Related application 60893237 has no patent number or issue date, is that what you are looking at?

loup-vaillant 13y ago

Muhaha, patent all you like, it won't protect you from the intelligence explosion (you know, that AI that turns itself into Skynet before the Patent Office can strike it down). On a more serious note, I'm glad I'm living in a country where there's no such thing as infringing software patents.

TheMagicHorsey 13y ago

Software patents are utter garbage. We all know that. Most software patent attorneys know that. The system has evolved to keep lawyers employed. It is a way of taxing engineers to support lawyers. The plaintiffs need lawyers. The defendants need lawyers. There must be judges. The entire system gets weighted down with this huge load of unproductive individuals. Think of how many engineers become patent attorneys because law is so lucrative. Entry level patent attorneys in firms make $160K a year. Think of how little an engineer makes even four or five years out of college. Its more lucrative to patent and sue, than to build. These are the little things that are going to erode America's competitiveness.

josephagoss 13y ago
I agree, I even know a friend who was studying computer science but moved over to law, his reasoning was how manipulating the law gives you a advantage over other people. The same is in Australia, our society values lawyers and they ruin almost everything. Make no mistake, many lawyers would see the world burn just to make a bigger buck. Many of them truly don't care.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  My experience is that law is like programming. The people who are making the "bigger buck" genuinely love their profession and take it seriously. The ones who only turned up for the bigger bucks quit because it bores and frustrates them. Not to mention, lawyers are held to the standard of fiduciary duty. That's fairly heavy duty.
- d5tryr 13y ago
  That's a courageous and bold statement to make. Apart from the weasel words that entirely undermine it. If you want to say that all lawyers are evil, without any evidence, at least have the conviction to say that. If you want to imply that some undefined minority, or possible majority, of lawyers may, or may not, potentially be paid arsonists, but might also not be arsonists, paid or otherwise, then... I dunno, maybe say something worthwhile instead.

woodchuck64 13y ago

Forbes article with some background, http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2012/07/09/riding-the-wave-of-artificial-intelligence/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2012/07/09/riding... The incredibly banal Kato Kaelin interviews Leslie Spring and Mimi Chen (at about 7:30 minutes) http://www.tubeguru.com/video/9311 http://www.tubeguru.com/video/9311 Are these two musicians, vocalists, or founders of cutting edge AI Cognitive Code Corporation? Or ALL of the ABOVE??

jacques_chester 13y ago

I worked out one reason why software patents are so terribly troublesome versus patents for physical mechanisms. Because we deal in abstractions. You can always take this piece of code you wrote and notice that it can be abstracted to solve a class of problems. And then that this class of problems is in turn a subclass of a larger set of problems. And then it's increasingly vague all the way down. Before long your patent application transforms from "Method to improve page retrieval on ARM7 CPUs" to "Method to improve caching in memory" to "Method to improve caching" to "Method to accelerate any computation". That generally doesn't happen in the physical world, because physical inventions aren't easily generalisable. You can't take a tractor and, with a few lines of code, abstract it into a platonic ideal that can also spit out cars, buses, trains, planes, ships and the starship Enterprise.

noonespecial 13y ago

I'm thinking that once you've got a patent on strong AI, you more or less have a patent on everything. It's a method and process for doing, well, everything a human ever could or would do.

coopdog 13y ago

So how can we / could we have stopped this patent. Is there an easy online way to submit prior art for patents under consideration? That way all the reviewer has to do is accept the prior art and nuke the application

axman6 13y ago
Do you have any prior art? This is not a patent for "Artificial intelligence" in general, it's a patent for a very specific method of doing something that appears intelligent, and this is actually what artificial intelligence is all about. See my comment above to see what is required for something to be relevant prior art. Basically, you're not going to find it. And who cares anyway, the scope of the claims is really quite narrow, it's going to take a lot of effort for someone to actually come up with a system which infringes this patent without having read the thing in the first place.
- VikingCoder 13y ago
  > my AI background is weak > it's going to take a lot of effort for someone First, you assert that you are not an expert in AI. Then you assert how much effort would be required to independently come up with the same implementation. You have to chose which of those two assertions to make.
  - axman6 13y ago
    My AI background is weak but not non-existant. But this is beside the point. I'm not the one making claims this is a junk patent and that it's clearly obvious. The ones who are have provided no proof that it is obvious. For a patent to be invalid, there must be proof, you can't just say "oh clearly it's obvious" because you can say that about anything at all once you know the solution to the problem. Regarding my comment on how much effort it would take, I was stating my opinion that it, at face value, doesn't seem obvious to me. But the assertion that it is obvious and a terrible patent is something that can be proven with a single link, but no one has provided one. And I believe the reason for this is because the naysayers have no idea what they're talking about and are too ignorant to know that just because the term artificial intelligence is used does not mean that they are claim all artificial intelligence systems conceivable to man, but merely the system they have invented. By all means, prove me wrong, find a citation that shows this is either not new or is obvious, but until you do, the patent stands as a valid patent. Any citation you find I'd be more than happy to look through and see whether it is a suitable citation, but until then, the naysayers haven't a leg to stand on.

axman6 13y ago

"Software patents are utter garbage" " I certainly hope that this gibberish isn't taken to be sufficient details for someone to implement." "isn't this patent a little bit too reaching and isn't the logic a little bit too obvious to be worthy of patent?" It's very clear from basically every single comment on this story that most of you have no clue about the patent system nor what to actually look for when sizing up a patent. I've picked just a few comments that demonstrate the general ignorance that can be seen here (this is not an insult, but people need to understand when they do not understand something and aren't qualified to comment). I'd love for someone to reply with a citation that shows that just claim 1 is not novel, or is not inventive. To meet this criteria, the citation must either disclose ALL THE FEATURES LISTED IN THE CLAIM or it must be OBVIOUS to produce SOMETHING EXACTLY AS CLAIMED based on one or more PRIOR ART documents. It is not sufficient that all the features be in a single citation, but it must be obvious to actually come to the same invention AS CLAIMED. So if someone could please find for me one or more citations which combined (and under Australian law it must be obvious to do so) which contains: A method for a computer system to interpret an input from a user and generate a response, comprising: 1) receiving a user input; 2) converting the user input into an input array comprising rows and columns having a plurality of concepts; 3) determining if any of the plurality of concepts in the input array is derived from a root concept; 4) if any of the plurality of concepts is derived from a root concept, replacing each such derived concept with the corresponding root concept, identifying one or more related concepts that relate to the root concept, and generating a multi-dimensional array based on the input array that includes the one or more related concepts; 5) generating one or more additional multi-dimensional arrays, based on the input, containing any composite concepts, each derived from two or more concepts contained in the original array; 6) marking one or more concepts in the multi-dimensional arrays as essential based on application-specific criteria; 7) correlating a plurality of concepts in the multi-dimensional array to a plurality of first elements in a database by comparing a plurality of linear arrays derived from the multidimensional array to the plurality of elements in the database, wherein the first elements in the database includes a link to a second element in the database do not comprise possible responses; 8) determining a plurality of possible responses to the user input based on the correlation of the multi-dimensional array and the plurality of elements in the database 9) and generating a response to the user input. There's 9 broad concepts here, and to my knowledge, at least 3, 4, 5 and 7 seem non-obvious to me, but my AI background is weak. Even if they are known, is it known to combine ALL those features in the way claimed? I'd be surprised if it were, the USPTO is actually quite good at searching in general. It's so depressing to see a forum of people who are supposed to be intelligent and rational jumping to their guns at the mere mention of the word patent. Of course there are some junk patents, but those few should not be used to devalue the work done by inventors big, small or individuals around the world. If you don't even know how to read a patent, why do you feel like you're qualified to comment on their validity? We don't discredit academic papers because we've seen some of the words in their titles before, so why should patents be any different? It's dishartening to see such ignorance almost encouraged on Hacker News.

e3pi 13y ago

Trade Secret. If you've a worthy AI engine/algorithmic break-through, software has the hugely greater advantage over physical inventions by securing it behind the API front-end. Nothing gained by filing a patent and everything to lose.

coldarchon 13y ago

The USA have to review their patent system for software or VERY soon Europe and the rest of the world are going to ignore ANY patent from USA ..