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."

That's great!

[the_humeister]

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?

Patents have become barriers to innovation

[shanen]

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.

Engineers, Do Not Feel Threatened

[Polemicist]

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 product goal to know what parameters to set for the algorithms.

The second concern is irrelevant, as engineers would still follow through with rigorous product testing to determine all the possible outcomes of the design, thus avoiding any unplanned problems.

The great value of these algorithms in producing ten to a hundred fold more efficient, faster, or longer lasting products will guarentee that their use will increase, creating a great demand for engineers who can work with them and who can expect high salary bonuses for such amazing results.

Intended?

[RAMMS+EIN]

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.

Bullshit

[suv4x4]

"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.

Re:Bullshit

[qengho]

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.

That's hardly a proof!

[DrSkwid]

> 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.

Re:Intended?

[Kjella]

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.

Re:That's hardly a proof!

[DrSkwid]

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.

They can't do it and still be trolls

[Tatarize]

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.

Re:That's hardly a proof!

[Alsee]

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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Re:Patents have become barriers to innovation

[shanen]

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?