[Patents] natural forces

[Luuk van Dijk Luuk.van.Dijk@xs4all.nl]

Gregory Aharonian wrote:
> 
> >Yet, the distinction between the physical and logical world, between
> >mind and matter, is an eternal one, whose relevance never changed in
> >human history.
> 
> Wrong.  I do not comment on mind and matter, but at least for computing,
> history as written by the great mathematicians of this century, people
> like Turing, Church, Post, Chaitin and others have quite convincingly
> proved that the physical embodiment of an algorithm, hardware or software,
> is irrelevant to understanding the nature of the algorithm - i.e., its
> relevance to other algorithms (to determine novelty/obviousness in the
> patent world), and its general efficiency.
> 

As a physicist, working for a company by the name of
Mind over Matter, I just have to comment on this.

For starters, I'd say one is more difficult to copy than the other.
And I have yet to see an algorithm cause a physical effect.  The
equations describing nuclear fission are NOT what cause the explosion.

You seem to argue that because there exists some  
correspondence between a string of bits and a Turing machine that is 
described by it, both should be equally patentable (or not).  

But the fact that there is a correspondence between a description and 
the described does not make them identical, nor is it neccesarily the
case that there does not exist a solid distinction between them, in 
spite of the correspondence.  And that distinction may serve to
soundly define different legal treatments.

It may seem that one patents *descriptions* of inventions, and in that
sense, the description of an algorithm may be indistinguishable of
the description of a piece of hardware performing it.  
But the algorithm is still a different thing than the hardware.  
So I'd like to argue that one patents a thing (by having the description
stamped by the EPO or the USPTO).

Post modernists wanting to argue with me (on the basis of modern
physical insights) that the description *is* the thing are invited
to me for a little experiment (double blind) in which he/she is
first hit with an algorithm, and then with a Cray T90implementing it. 

So the following is a perfectly sound and defendable statement: 
The fact that a piece of hardware performs a computation should not
be the reason that that computation is patentable, nor the hardware 
for that matter.  That does not exclude the possibility of the
hardware still being patentable.


I don't really think the problem with patents is of a philosophical nature.

I don't really think you believe that either.

Luuk van Dijk

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