Working Around Patents with Evolutionary Design

An anonymous reader writes "Using computational trial-and-error allowed a Stanford team to come up with a patent-free WiFi antenna. Patent rules are tricky to formulate as self-interest dictates that the claim is as general as possible. Patent fences effectively can build a substantive competitive barrier to markets. Using evolutionary tactics may be a way to legally and ethically bypass these roadblocks."

and then....

[by Anonymous Coward]

and then you patent the resulting design.

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[kailoran (887304)]

Better yet, what if someone patents all "evolutionary-designed $DEVICE" (antennas, cables, whatever), making any further attempts to evolve a different version a violation?

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[Vlad_the_Inhaler (32958)]

They could even do that.

I'd cheerfully forgive them if they then pulled a trick a bit like one of the Gnu licenses - "if you use this method then you can't patent the result".

Ob

[Edie O'Teditor (805662)]

Intelligent design loses out yet again.

So what's to prevent patent trolls doing the same?

[tomhudson (43916)]

Its time to "fix" this problem by removing software and business methods from the purview of the patent office.

Re:So what's to prevent patent trolls doing the sa

[Z00L00K (682162)]

Request that patent claims has to be specific enough. A too general patent shouldn't be granted, and licensing for a patent has to be related to the amount of effort put into it. So if I design a new antenna in 5 minutes and patent it I may only license the design for a certain amount of money, say $0.5 per piece.

Of course - it's sometimes hard to decide the amount of effort put into a design, but in general - the scale of invention is ranging from obvious to ground-breaking. In the area of antennas it's

Koza's Patents

[jefu (53450)]

Perhaps they'll be blocked by Koza's patents on genetic programming [genetic-programming.com].

They can't do it and still be trolls

[Tatarize (682683)]

Patent trolls usually patent general quite obvious things. GP tend to evolve actually innovative things. If they did it, they would get some good designs rather than the very general noninnovative designs that qualifies them as trolls. However, it is quite true that after getting a good design via GP you can patent it.

Yes, but...

[Empiric (675968)]

What's to stop the company which is engaging in the exclusionary patenting from running exactly the same algorithm and patenting every viable permutation of "thing X" it "evolves"?

I still think improvement in the patent system still has to be made on the level of scoping patentability, in the long run.

BTW, I accelerated the production of this post by using Intelligent Design instead. :p

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[caramelcarrot (778148)]

Wouldn't that make the patented device obvious?

That's great!

[the_humeister (922869)]

I love this part:

Perhaps the most cunning use of an evolutionary algorithm, though, is by Dr Koza himself. His team at Stanford developed a Wi-Fi antenna for a client who did not want to pay a patent-licence fee to Cisco Systems. The team fed the algorithm as much data as they could from the Cisco patent and told the software to design around it. It succeeded in doing so. The result is a design that does not infringe Cisco's patent--and is more efficient to boot. A century and a half after Darwin suggested natural selection as the mechanism of evolution, engineers have proved him right once again.

But who's to stop the person who wrote the algorithm to patent the solution that bypassed the original patent? Or the algorithm itself for that matter?

Re:That's great!

[Kamineko (851857)]

In that case, I will create a patent circumvention method patent circumvention method and place it in the public domain.

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[riegel (980896)]

I am not a big fan of the patent system. but...

This example shows the patent system working to the end it was designed (encourageing innovation). If Cisco had not had a patent on design A design B may have never surfaced.

Am I wrong?

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[Bozdune (68800)]

Yes, you're wrong.

Evolved antennas at NASA

[by Anonymous Coward]

Efficient antennas 'designed' by evolution [nasa.gov] are already in use on spacecraft.

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[AceJohnny (253840)]

Except in the NASA case, they goal was the traditional engineering one: efficiecy. Whats particular in this case was the goal to 1) *avoid* certain design characteristics and 2) because of patents

Remember, "the current patent system is bad, mmkay?"

Especially as you have to "waste" engineering effort to work around it.

Patents have become barriers to innovation

[shanen (462549)]

Patents were supposed to encourage innovation, but modern patent law has evolved in a way that makes it more of a hindrance than a help. You basically have to have a large corporation and a battery of lawyers behind you to support your patent application, and the corporations aren't even interested unless they are very sure they can see a path to big profits. For the corporations the big attraction is that the patent grants them monopoly profits, and they could not care less about the social values (or harms) of the innovations themselves. From that purely monetary perspective it makes perfect sense to focus on the value of patents for blocking competitors and for lawsuits--though SCO showed that the strategy doesn't always work.

I think the fundamental problem is that the values of patents are too highly variable, and this variability has completely overwhelmed the simple-minded idea of a temporary monopoly. There are cases where it makes sense to motivate innovation by the exclusive monopoly, but almost never for the specific period of time that is hard-coded into patent law. Some patents should lapse more quickly, though of course the companies will argue they should last *MUCH* longer, and they have a lot of lobbying money to push with. Some patentable ideas are very quick and inexpensive to develop, while others take years and lots of money, but patent law doesn't really consider such trivia.

The bottom line dynamic is that most innovation has to start within an individual, but patents have become a team sport. If you aren't on the right team, it doesn't really matter how innovative your ideas are. You're very unlikely to succeed at the patent game without such a team.

It was not evolution!

[Jane Q. Public (1010737)]

Patent law has not "evolved". It has been maliciously twisted and distorted by corporate interests. That is a very different thing.

And if you want it to stay anywhere near halfway sane, write your Senators and tell them to vote against their new "patent reform" bill. That would change the law to award patents to the first who apply for a patent, rather than the first to invent. Talk about stifling innovation! That would give all the advantages to corporate lawyers, and our patent system would fail completely in its purpose.

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[AceJohnny (253840)]

Patents were supposed to encourage innovation...

In my book, this circumvention technique *is* innovation. :)

Re:Patents have become barriers to innovation

[shanen (462549)]

In another pig's eye. A corporation has *NO* brain and it creates *NOTHING*. It is the individuals within the corporation who do any actual thinking and any actual innovating. The notions that corporations are in somewhat similar to human beings or that corporations somehow deserve some of the rights accorded to humans are two of the most pernicious ones afflicting us, the actual human beings.

I'm not surprised you didn't want to put your name on such a stupid comment. My own settings actually ignore such stupid and anonymous cowards--but I stumbled across your post by accident as I checked something else.

So why did I reply? Because in your cowardly stupidity you have skirted around the edges of an actually important truth. It is possible that there is a 'higher form of intelligence' involved in corporations. However, from our perspective it would be more like the individual cells trying to understand what is going on with human intelligence in the creation of a novel. Yeah, the cells were involved, but they have no conception of what they contributed to. From that perspective, my current speculation is that perhaps the stock markets somehow express the higher level emergent intelligence--but my evidence is mostly negative. The stock prices surely don't seem to have any realistic relationships to the ostensible values of the companies. Google's market cap is over $100 billion? On what physical assets? Or even on what knowledge they actually own?

Engineers, Do Not Feel Threatened

[Polemicist (1166967)]

Talk of greater applications of these evolutionary algorithms has often been accompanied by fears that they will replace engineers, however, this is not the case. Most of the concerns come in the following two forms: it removes engineers from the design process and that since they didn't design it, it may not work as they expect it to.

While engineers are not actively designing the product, their jobs are still secure as the companies will always need someone to design the algorithms and to study the pro

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[cgenman (325138)]

higher salaries for such amazing results? When, exactly, have these corresponded? One can command a higher salary the more critical the job and the fewer people available to fill it to satisfaction. Any sort of automation or structuring that reduces the specialization broadens the applicant pool and reduces salaries. To build said antenna one would need to have the basics of antenna design and programming, not the decades of experience and volumes of fuzzy knowledge that would otherwise be required.

Don't

Intended?

[RAMMS+EIN (578166)]

A friend of mine once told me that this is actually an intended result of patents. Note that a patent applies to a specific way of arriving at something, not the something itself. So, the idea is that if the something is desirable, others will go out of their way to find alternative ways to arrive at something. Some of these might be better than the original. Or new somethings may be encountered along the way (inventions tend to happen by accident, yada yada). Whatever the case, patents foster innovation...in this case, by shutting the door on using what is already known to work.

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[speaker of the truth (1112181)]

You don't understand:
Avoiding paying for something is good.
Paying for something is bad.

Patents help make sure people have to pay.

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[r6144 (544027)]

I wish patents work more like copyrights in this aspect. If there are likely a huge number of ways to accomplish something, someone can patent one method he has found and others will not be allowed to copy it without permission. If there is only one correct (efficient) way to do something, the corresponding parts of the claims get filtered out.

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[rabtech (223758)]

Although patents may fulfill this function, their original intent was to get rid of the whole trade guild / trade secret situation, where only one company or a small group of people had some particular bit of knowledge or new invention and they refused to share it with the rest of society, as well as to provide incentives to inventors to create new inventions because those inventors know their risk and hard work won't be immediately ripped off.

In exchange for sharing that knowledge with the world you get a

Re:Intended?

[Kjella (173770)]

That's the theory, that it protects one way to the goal. In practise, if you read software patents they're never that way, try for example reading some of the portable music player patents Apple had to pay for. It was basicly "method for hierarchies, filters and multiple sort columns applied to a portable music player". It's like walling off the goal, because you've basicly described how it functions and it doens't matter how you achieve that functionality.

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[suv4x4 (956391)]

A friend of mine once told me that this is actually an intended result of patents. Note that a patent applies to a specific way of arriving at something, not the something itself. So, the idea is that if the something is desirable, others will go out of their way to find alternative ways to arrive at something. Some of these might be better than the original. Or new somethings may be encountered along the way (inventions tend to happen by accident, yada yada). Whatever the case, patents foster innovation...

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[Ant P. (974313)]

You could say that Cisco... patented themselves into a corner this time.

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[Jah-Wren Ryel (80510)]

So, the idea is that if the something is desirable, others will go out of their way to find alternative ways to arrive at something. Some of these might be better than the original.

That doesn't make sense. If an alternate method really is better, then that fact alone is enough incentive. If the new method's benefits are not enough of an incentive, then adding patents to the mix only creates artificial incentive which is economically inefficient.

Or new somethings may be encountered along the way (inventions tend to happen by accident, yada yada).

That would be a very poor justification for two reasons -

1. discoveries sometimes happen by "accident" in pure science, but inventions are applied science and happy accidents are much more rare there
2. a policy of encouraging random accidents wo

Bullshit

[suv4x4 (956391)]

"Using computational trial-and-error allowed a Stanford team to come up with a patent-free WiFi antenna. Patent rules are tricky to formulate as self-interest dictates that the claim is as general as possible. Patent fences effectively can build a substantive competitive barrier to markets. Using evolutionary tactics may be a way to legally and ethically bypass these roadblocks."

Two problems:

1. For the past 10+ years I keep seeing various articles talking about evolution design and they are all about antennas and simple analogue circuit designs. Antennas are certainly susceptible to evolutionary design, but if we'll be driving the industry forward we'll need to throw lots of R&D to develop evolutionary design algos that can design something more complex. My point is, it's hugely promising, but it's still not here in a big way.

2. The bigger problem, and which is what caused my exclamation in the title: there's no way to avoid overly broad patents. Evolutionary designs in fact often arrive at designs that match exactly various patents. Which means, when your super computer arrives at a working design, you still need to go through all the tedious work of verifying it's not patented, and if it is, start the algo again and hope for the best.

And the limit for rerunning the algo plenty of times to get patent-free design is the same such as manual design: we don't have infinite time, and the solutions to a problem are sometimes finite, and not that many.

I think patents should be left in place, but their running period should be shortened. The industry is developing at such an amazing pace that we make more progress in an year, than what took 10 years before. The original lawmakers never intended their law to run unmodified in such circumstances.

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[qengho (54305)]

Evolutionary designs in fact often arrive at designs that match exactly various patents.

According to TFA the particulars of Cisco's patent were fed to the program for the purpose of excluding those features. Presumably this would work for other problems.

dont give em ideas

[wikinerd (809585)]

shhht.... dont give em ideas, the patent holders will use evolutionary algorithms themselves in their next patents to make them ever broader

That's hardly a proof!

[DrSkwid (118965)]

> A century and a half after Darwin suggested natural selection as the mechanism of evolution, engineers have proved him right once again.

I would challenge the assertion that entering the design parameters and working out which is the best result isn't proof of the origin of the species suggested by Darwin.

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[suv4x4 (956391)]

I would challenge the assertion that entering the design parameters and working out which is the best result isn't proof of the origin of the species suggested by Darwin.

In such a big discussion, you'll often hear idiotic claims by both sides.

You know, it's kinda like the people attacking Microsoft on Slashdot. Even if Microsoft has real issues, people would rather opt for tired cliches and bullshit arguments, since it's easier.

Bottom line is, you can never convince someone who's on the extreme side of a di

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[Alsee (515537)]

Digitally implemented evolution like the article's examples do not prove evolution as the historical explanation for biology on earth (there is of course other proof of evolution as historical fact such as the complete and continuous Foraminifera fossil record), but digitally implemented evolution like the article's examples *do* prove that Darwin was right that his proposed process *works*, that it does indeed have the creative power to produce new information such as new inventions or new genetics.

-

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[DrSkwid (118965)]

Designing a radio antenna with an algorithm is not a proof of anything, except that it is possible to design a radio antenna with an algorithm.

This'll work great...

[DrEldarion (114072)]

... until someone patents evolutionary design.

Patent Free Antenna?

[nurb432 (527695)]

Just means the orginal patent they were trying to circumvent wasnt drawn up properly.

Even Better: Repair Our Damaged Patent System

[Jane Q. Public (1010737)]

We need to get our patent system working like it used to. And do prevent it from degrading even further, write your Senators and tell them to vote against their "patent reform" bill.

If this became law, it would award patents to the first person who filed for the patent, rather than the inventor. This is such a travesty that I cannot believe that it even passed the House... but it did. If that were to pass, you could say goodbye to innovation in the United States. The corporate lawyers would be able to pa

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[Metasquares (555685)]

You act as if this is a bad thing. Evolution works on the scale of societies as well. If one society becomes unfriendly to innovation, it will be marginalized as it loses technical dominance. Ultimately the most powerful societies will be the ones that are friendly to innovation because the others couldn't keep up. So it works out nicely.

Ahem...

[Jane Q. Public (1010737)]

Excuse me, but it IS a bad thing, from your point of view, if idiots withing your own society are CAUSING it to "devolve" and be anti-competitive.

All hype

[$carab (464226)]

Genetic algorithms are the Ruby on Rails of optimization problems. If you can define a state space and a fitness function, you're almost certainly better off using (non-)linear programming, constraint programming, or a local search method like tabu search.

To quote the AI Bible (AIMA 2e, Russell and Norvig): [It] is not clear whether the appeal of genetic algorithms arises from their performance or from their aesthetically pleasing origins in the theory of evolution.

But because GAs are so intuitive for anyon

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[nyekulturniy (413420)]

I just patented that.

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[speaker of the truth (1112181)]

I think this might be prior art.

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[speaker of the truth (1112181)]

Yes but saying that he intelligently designed a new antennae with the aid of software is taboo around here.

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[SpinyNorman (33776)]

You can say that, but then to be consistent you'd have to be willing to also describe "intelligent design" regarding new species as nothing but the same dumb evolutionary "algorithm" running on different hardware.

Except that of course in nature you don't need to simulate a thing - DNA/competition/etc really exist, so there is no simulation algorithm and hence no algorithm writer. Oh, well.

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[astaldaran (1040462)]

this is nonsense. In the theory of evolution data is mostly lost and note gained so function is lost and not gained. The only time data is added is with some sort of fluke mutation in which case the mutation alone will not help and so will be cast aside (according to evolution). This is known as irreducibly complex and is one of the biggest arguments from many scientists against evolution or at least against the standard theory of evolution. The evolution that happens here is closely monitored and desig

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[pla (258480)]

Hardly "evolutionary", designing a system that designs trial and error is hardly "evolutonary", its basically an intelligent search of a search space compared against a pattern.

Not "evolution" in the "squishy wet things having sex sense", but in the randomized state-space search sense - The use of an iterated genetic algorithm to satisfy an arbitrary fitness measure. "Natural" evolution represents merely a specific instantiation of that larger concept, but certainly not the only possible one.



Evoluti

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[Metasquares (555685)]

Doing a thorough analysis of several unique sort when you were trying to push it on Wikipedia revealed no asymptotic advantage over basic bubble sort. I'm not going to repeat the analysis with this algorithm, but I'm inclined to be skeptical based on that experience. Also, perhaps you have a non-asymptotic advantage over quicksort (or let's say a modified quicksort without the O(n^2) worst-case complexity), but the O(n log n) bound on comparison sorting has been proved optimal.