Non-mathematical patents

Posted Jun 5, 2009 11:34 UTC (Fri) by Zack (guest, #37335)
In reply to: Non-mathematical patents by man_ls
Parent article: Donald Knuth: Mathematical Ideas, or Algorithms, Should Not Be Patented (Groklaw)

>A trash can on a desktop is not mathematical,

I agree that having an icon with a particular action attached may not *seem* mathematical, but *anything* that happens on your desktop (or a computer in general), is inherently algorithmic and as such mathematical, which I believe is the point of contention that lies at the root of a distinction between "mathematical algorithms" and "non-mathematical algorithms"

Take every bit that your computer currently holds and write these all down on a long string of 1s and 0s. Call that string A.
Now use the trashcan, put some files in it and throw them away.
Now take another snapshot of the state your computer is in. Call that string B.

You now have two very very long strings of 1s and 0s. Now ask the question, does there exist a Turing machine that will take string A as its input and will arive at string B?
The answer to that question is (obviously) yes.
Since such a Turing machine exists, the transformation was an algorithmic one, i.e. describable through an algorithm.

I realize it doesn't appeal to intuition or a practical view of the use of computers. But by the above example, everything you could ever do on a computer no matter how sophisticated or trivial is an example of a mathematical operation. So everything that happens on your computer is done by though an algorithm and there are no non-mathematical algorithms in computer-software.

Non-mathematical patents

Posted Jun 5, 2009 15:13 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

That is precisely the reductionistim view that in my view is not useful when fighting software patents.

By the same token you might say that everything done in a factory is physics: a bunch of atoms come in, a bunch of atoms in different states come out. Physics is not patentable, therefore nothing done in a factory is patentable. Or, all pharma products are just chemistry, and chemistry is not patentable -- therefore medicines are not patentable. Hey, I went too far, chemistry is patentable. But chemistry is, after all, just physics -- atoms changing states, and physics is not patentable as we well know. Again, some form of physics must be patentable. But if I remember my physics correctly, it was all numbers, magnitudes and equations, or mathematics. So, how can mathematics be patentable again?

Anything that happens in our physical Universe can be described mathematically, as far as we know. Therefore just saying that something "is just mathematics" does not help when judging patentability. Let us instead focus on utility and social benefit.

Non-mathematical patents

Posted Jun 5, 2009 15:59 UTC (Fri) by sepreece (guest, #19270) [Link]

"the transformation was an algorithmic one, i.e. describable through an algorithm"

And there's the problem - the algorithm is an abstract (but specific) description of the process carried out, but it is not itself that process. The process is carried out by electronic devices in a computer.

Similarly, a patent for a chemical process is an abstract (but specific) description of a process carried out by physical devices.

The usual argument (which, I believe, led to extending patent protection to software in the US) is that while the algorithm itself is abstract and can be carried out completely abstractly by a human reader to get the answer, the combination of that algorithm with hardware executing it is patentable, because the patent is then describing a way of carrying out that computation in hardware (the computer), just as a chemical-process patent describes a way of carrying out a process in a chemical plant.

Note that while I do not find the idea of software patents any more or less offensive than the idea of patents in general, I DO find the specifics of the implementation of software patents offensive - the terms are far too long for the domain and the examination process is wildly too permissive. Those could be corrected without throwing out software patents entirely.