Re: Note: more on information is physical, software technical

[Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>]

On Mon, 5 Jul 2004, Gregory Aharonian wrote:

> 
>     From May 5th to 9th, a conference of physicists and philosophers (i.e.
> people who understand the "physical" better than politicians) held a
> conference in Minnesota to debate the foundations of quantum mechanics.
> (An account of the conference is in the 25 June 2004 issue of Science,
> page 1896-7).  Quantum mechanics (and its decohered classical mechanics)
> underlies everything that is physical.  Applications of these mechanics
> is as technical as you can get.  Descriptions of these applications is
> as patentable as you can get.

and more of the same, see below, which is already quite well known on the
patents at aful org list and on

        http://swpat.ffii.org/players/aharonian/
        http://kwiki.ffii.org/SwpataharonianEn ;

The fact that information theory can be used as a basis for some physical
theories doesn't mean that the mind-matter distinction in the patent
system doesn't works or works any worse than other legal concepts (such as
"intentionality" or "novelty").  And even if the mind-matter distinction
could be shown to be completely unworkable, the consequence from this
would not be that everything novel has to be patentable but perhaps that
nothing should be patentable because the patent system as a whole would
then have become unworkable.

Yet we have planned a panel on these "information physics" discussions at
the Nov 8-9 conference http://plone.ffii.org/events/2004/test/, and it ;
would be nice to be able to sort these arguments out better than we have
done so far.

>     So what was one of the main topics of this group of scientists?  I
> quote from the article:
> 
>     ..., participants at this year's Seven Pines Symposium are
>     taking a different tack entirely.  Spurred by recent efforts
>     to develop quantum information technologies, thinkers such
>     as Jeffrey Bub, a philosopher at the University of Maryland,
>     hope to prove that QUANTUM MECHANICS GROWS NATURALLY OUT OF
>     THE PRINCIPLES OF INFORMATION THEORY.
> 
> That's right, information is the fundamentual basis of the physical.
> 
>     Last year Bub and colleagues showed that three restrictions
>     on how information can be transmitted and copied can reproduce
>     from scratch the basic features of quantum mechanics.  They
>     assume that the world can be described by a type of mathematics
>     known as a C* algebra.  Then they lay down the laws: no
>     instantaneous transmission of information, no perfect copying
>     of information, and no sharing of information in a particular
>     way called "unconditional bit committment".  Those restrictions
>     produce a mathematical formalism that looks like quantum
>     mechanics, Bub says.  The result suggests that THE BASIC STUFF
>     OF THE UNIVERSE IS INFORMATION, he says.
> 
> That's right, information is the fundamentual basis of the physical. That
> information is physical is seen in the effects of changes of information
> in microprocessors.  Current microprocessors are so fast that transistor
> state changes due to information manipulation lead to excessive heat being
> generated - as much as five times the heat per square inch a stove produces.
> The July 2nd San Jose Mercury News has a nice article on this heat problem:
> www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/9063464.htm
> 
>     "What's it mean to say that the universe is just information?",
>     says Philip Stamp, a physicist at the University of British
>     Columbia in Vancouver.  "To me information has to be information
>     about something."
> 
> Interesting question.  How about EPO Boards trying to answer the question,
> instead of fostering the semantic fiction that "technical" can't be
> defined.
> 
>     Physicist Christopher Fuchs of Lucent Technologies has an answer:
>     The wave function is an observer's information about the
>     objective world.  A measurement instantly refines that information,
>     which is all in the observer's head, giving the illusion that the
>     wave function collapses.  In Fuch's view, the instantaneous
>     collapse is no more mysterious than the clarity that suddenly
>     emerges when you remember that you left your checkbook beside the
>     toaster.  "Quantum measurement is the refinement of expectations,
>     period.", Fuch says.  "The only mystery in quantum mechanics is
>     why there is a restriction" on the completeness of knowledge.
> 
> If transforming the physical is the requirement to be technical, and
> descriptions of such transformations patentable, then transforming
> information is technical, and the descriptions of such transformations,
> hardware circuits and software listings, are patentable.  Indeed, you
> see this equivalence logic being used in patent specifications.  For
> example, from U.S. Patent Application 20040117276 for a system for
> electronic shopping, paragraph 44 reads:
> 
>       [0044]  The system described herein is not limited to the
>       implementations described above; it may find applicability
>       in any computing or processing environment.  The system
>       may be implemented in hardware, software, or a combination
>       of the two.  For example, the system may be implemented
>       using circuitry, such as one or more of programmable logic
>       (e.g. an ASIC), logic gates, a processor, and a memory.
> 
> One of the gurus of modern computer science, Peter Denning, in the July
> 2004 issue of Communications of the ACM, in an article titled "The Field
> of Programmers Myth", writes in the first paragraph:
> 
>       What's more, many people [falsely] believe computer science
>       is only a technology field without much science and
>       engineering of its own; the word "science" in our title
>       is undeserved. ....
> 
>       The great principles framework is a new portrayal of our field
>       that emphasizes or scientific and engineering principles and
>       our four core practices.  Our fundamental principles are in
>       design and in the mechanics of computation, coordination,
>       recollection and automation.   ...  Our four core practices
>       are programming, engineering of systems, modeling and innovation.
> 
> All this technical language about the world of software, and yet software
> is deemed not to achieve a technical effect?  What scientific and
> semantic nonsense.
> 
> Not to say that the physicality of information, the technicality of
> information processing, is not debatable (and subject to much physics
> research).  But it is much much less debatable than maintaining the
> nonsense that "techincal" can't be more precisely defined and that
> software is not technical.  Please stop this betrayal of physics, and
> focus on the real task at hand - getting Patent Offices to improve the
> quality of issued patents.
> 
> Greg Aharonian
> Internet Patent News Service
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