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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 16 2012 @ 08:15 PM EST |
First off, thank you very much for taking the time to reply.
Secondly, thank you for correcting me and explaining your position. I have the
conference on in the background while working on other things, so what I wrote
is what I took away from it.
That being said, I think that the issue with presenting it that way is that any
general purpose computer can compute anything we understand to be computable,
though perhaps not efficiently. Once you have a problem of computation you have
an implementation that is more or less obvious, so long as the mathematics is
understood (often by being subsumed in the design of the computer and the
high-level languages used to program it). You are right in that stating the
problem in such a way that is computable is not necessarily obvious, but I don't
believe that such a problem statement could possibly be patentable, although I'm
open to examples. Are you suggesting that the mere recognition that a problem
has a computable solution should count as a patentable discovery?
The only other two categories of subject matter I can think of which could
potentially be patentable would fail for being natural laws/mathematics/etc.
These would be: new categories of computable functions and more efficient
algorithms, although if they could be embodied in hardware that becomes a more
interesting problem, depending on how you feel about equivalence.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: jimrandomh on Monday, November 19 2012 @ 12:07 PM EST |
What I said is that most
software engineers believe that
implementation is obvious
once you identify the problem. Coming up with the
idea/problem is NOT always obvious - often, but not always.
This seems strange to me. I think that, by using the word
obviousness,
you may be drawing the wrong distinction. Once the problem
is
identified,
there is a lot of work - usually more than 99% of it - still
to be
done in
the implementation. However, that work is mere work; while
there may
be
some insights involved, they are of the sort that a
competent programmer
can be expected to have, if they work on it for awhile.
You're trying to
frame the question as a matter of where in the process the
large non-
obvious
insight is located, but there usually just isn't
one; it's just a
lot of work
on a pile of details. Unfortunately, the sorts
of details
typically contained
in patents do not relate to that work at
all - they
aren't the product of it
and they don't help with it. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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