US-Patent on perfect machine translation

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

On 2002-02-22 the US patent office granted a patent, US 6341372, on
the problem of perfect translation by reduction of language meaning to
epistemic instances

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1='6,341,372'.WKU.&OS=PN/6,341,372&RS=PN/6,341,372

What is claimed is

  1. A method for the universal machine translation of arbitrary languages,
  comprising the steps of:

  identifing high-level grammatical constructions of an arbitrary source
  language word stream;

  constructing a grammatical world model of the syntax of the high-level
  grammatical construction arbitrary source language word stream based only on
  epistemic instances of the source language;

  decomposing the arbitrary source language into only its epistemic instances
  and an arbitrary target language into only its epistemic instances, wherein
  the source language epistemic instances semantically correspond to the
  target language epistemic instances;

  translating the epistemic instances of the source language word stream into
  semantically equivalent epistemic instances of the target language with
  substantially no loss in meaning;

  constructing a grammatical world model of the syntax of a target language
  high-level word stream using only the epistemic instances of the target
  language; and

  generating a translated target language word stream;

  wherein each of the epistemic instances comprises a pair of objects of
  transformation in the source language's or the target language's word
  stream, and a transformer of the pair of objects.

and further claims.

The description is very voluminous and explains a whole new cosmology,
comprising insights about buddhism illumination, androids, perpetuum
mobiles, subject-object dichotomy and much more.  Based on this
cosmology, a solution to the above-claimed problem seems to become
possible.  At least it should be difficult for an examiner to refute
that it does.  He could ask the inventor to provide a working
reference implementation, but that is not adequate, because only a
key idea of a huge complex system is claimed.

It would be much simpler for an examiner to say that this solution is
not about controllable physical forces, i.e. not technical in the
traditional sense of the patent system.  But this is no longer allowed
at the USPTO, nor at the EPO.  He could also protest against function
claims, but those were also admitted as a corollary of software
patentability in the early 80s.

In

        http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/papri/patpruef/

the german patent examiner Dr. Kiesewetter-Köbinger analyses the
difficulties that come with admitting claims to abstract teachings.

We might also once again claim the German Federal Court

  http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/papri/bgh-dispo76/        ;

  However in all cases the plan-conformant utilisation of controllable
  natural forces has been named as an essential precondition for
  asserting the technical character of an invention.  As shown above,
  the inclusion of human mental forces as such into the realm of the
  natural forces, on whose utilisation in creating an innovation the
  technical character of that innovation is founded, would lead to the
  consequence that virtually all results of human mental activity, as
  far as they constitute an instruction for plan-conformant action and
  are causally overseeable, would have to be attributed a technical
  meaning.  In doing so, we would however de facto give up the concept
  of the technical invention and extend the patent system to a vast
  field of achievements of the human mind whose essence and limits can
  neither be recognized nor overseen.

More salient quotations are being collected at

  http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/cusku/

-- 
Hartmut Pilch                   http://offen.ffii.org/ffii/Members/phm/
Schutz der Innovation vor der Patentinflation:   http://swpat.ffii.org/ ;
100K Stimmen 300 Firmen gegen Logikpatente:  http://www.noepatents.org/