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"Software patents are utter garbage" " I certainly hope that this gibberish isn't taken to be sufficient details for someone to implement." "isn't thi
by 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.
- lukifer 13y ago"The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying." - John Carmack
- axman6 13y agoBut if that were the case, the patent would almost certainly be invalid; the claimed invention must be inventive, i.e. having come up with something that is not obvious. What is described is coming up with the obvious solution to a problem, not coming up with an inventive solution to the problem. It's also annoying when people use soundbites from famous people as proof; they sound good and make sense on the surface but usually don't hold up to scrutiny (and I say this as someone who has a lot of time for John Carmack's advice and insights). An example might be the invention of bloom filters[1]. I would argue that if you were looking for a way to check for membership in a set in the time before the bloom filter's invention, it would not have been obvious to devise a structure which can give false positives but no false negatives through the use of multiple hashing functions and a bit array. It is of course obvious to us now, knowing the answer, but at the time it would not have been. this is what the patent system is about; encouraging people to invest time, effort and money into inventive solutions to problems by giving them a way to protect their investment for a limited period of time. Somehow this all becomes evil when a large company is doing it, but you'll all be outraged when a startup comes up with something inventive and have their ideas "stolen" by big companies when they didn't seek to protect themselves. [1] I'm not saying this is a shining example of a patented technology; I have no idea whether it has ever been patented or not. However it is a good example of an inventive solution and one which most people would not regard as obvious and be able to come up with through routine trial and error.
- shenberg 13y agoCarmack was talking from experience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume#Depth_fail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_volume#Depth_fail