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| Authored by: PolR on Monday, March 11 2013 @ 11:15 AM EDT |
| This point is not of our own creation. See the philosophy of
platonism in mathematics. This type of question will pop up in the mind of
anyone familiar with these notions. Platonism is pretty much mainstream
philosophy. Anyone who has studied it a little will raise the point.
Our
choice is to keep silent and the issue pops up unanswered, or we mention it and
people unfamiliar with the philosophical concept are confused.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 11 2013 @ 01:15 PM EDT |
Shoot, I can't make an account so I will just post anonymously in this thread.
A core issue in this debate is this:
Word problems are not different from math problems. A great many people find it
difficult to transition from doing math to doing word problems. I believe this
is at the core of a lot of the misunderstanding. They think somehow that taking
abstract variables and numbers and giving them real-world values somehow changes
them into something other than math.
I disagree with that. I never thought of word problems as different from math
problems. I also have PhD in math and I am a programmer, and I taught
undergraduate math and CS courses when I was in school. Generally, when people
struggled with word problems, it was because they didn't understand the
mathematics itself. If they understand the math, then they can go between the
real-world meaning of the numbers and symbols and the underlying math.
I also wish that people who engaged in this "software is math"
"no it isn't" "yes it is" debate would at least have a
decent undergraduate understanding of both subjects. Mathematics changes
dramatically after the second year, so without going through the process of
learning how to do mathematics, it might seem ridiculous that software is
mathematics. My suggested requirement would be to be able to get a 600 on the
GRE math and CS (assuming the scores are still out of 800). I'm ok with
self-taught programmers pointing to X years of experience, but on the math side
I would want to see an undergraduate math degree or the GRE. Almost nobody
learns mathematics at a high enough level outside of school.
I think it's a fair thing to ask because patent attorneys have been known to
dismiss arguments against patents by pointing out that the person making the
argument isn't an attorney. Well, if the letter of the law says that you can't
patent math, then the question of what is and isn't mathematics should be left
to people who actually understand it, and not people who stopped at differential
equations before they got an engineering degree and then went to law school.
It seems rather odd to me that you can't patent a solution to a "math
problem" but if you turn it into a "word problem", it somehow
changes things and you can get a patent on that. When of course, it then means
you've patented all uses of the solution to the "math problem" since
any solution to the "math problem" could be used to solve your
particular "word problem".
I also want to mention that I don't have a problem with industrial processes
being patented, and I don't have a problem with people using software as part of
those processes, but when all you're doing is giving meaning to the inputs and
outputs and then not creating anything, it never stops being math.
But the idea that changing the electromagnetic energies inside of a computer
during its use constitute creating a new machine seems disingenuous to me at
best. It's a configurable device being configured, not the creation of a new
machine. Since these machines are basically giant banks of switches, the issue
is that as the number of switches increases, people all of a sudden want to
allow patents that stop other people from arranging switches in machines that
already existed long before the patent was first filed.
Pretend that there's a machine that can do 2 things, and there's a swtich
attached to it that configures the machine to do thing 1 or thing 2 depending on
how the switch is set. Let's also assume that the machine has existed for a very
long time, such that no patents cover the machine anymore. After a long period
of time when all possible patents have expired on that machine, someone turns it
on and flips the switch to 1 or 2.
Is there any way in which someone else could get a new patent today that could
be used to stop someone from flipping the switch to 1 or 2 and turning on the
machine to let it do whatever it does?
Does flipping the switch from 1 to 2 or back constitute making a new machine?
I'm guessing the answer is no. Hopefully the machine itself would constitute
prior art. If not, ignore the rest and things are worse than I thought they
were.
So, assuming the answer is no, what about 2 switches, could I configure a
machine with 2 switches? What about 10? 100? 1000? 10000000? At what point does
this break down?
For someone with mathematical training, there would be no reason to ever have a
breakdown. It would be a simple inductive argument.
Pretend that someone does think that this breaks down somewhere. If they are not
mathematically sophisticated, then they may not be able to reason about large
numbers that well, so they assume something magical must happen.
If they are mathematically sophisticated, then the next question to them would
be where does it break down? How many switches do I get before I reach the point
where I cannot stop someone from configuring the switches in a machine with N
switches, but I can stop someone from configuring the switches in a machine with
N+1 switches for some particular magical N.
I doubt a sound mathematical or logical reason (that remains within the realm of
mathematics and doesn't spill over into areas such as economics or "it's
hard so we just have to" or makes assumptions about what other people are
thinking).
I guess the claim could be obviousness, but a mathematically sophisticated
person will be able to use induction and I believe it would be obvious to them
that there is nothing special about this particular minimal number N. Therefore
it shouldn't be the minimal number. But are there any special numbers? If no
numbers are special, then none of them can be the minimal number, therefore
there should be no minimal number where the flipping switches argument breaks
down.
And that would be the core of the argument: Computers existed when you started
working on this software idea that could run the software you are making, so
they are prior art for the idea since you could merely configure them to do
whatever is you're trying to patent.
I realize this argument will probably never convince a non-mathematician, but
that's a big part of the problem. I don't really know what to do since this
debate exists I believe becuase a lot of people simply don't understand enough
mathematics. And since patent attorneys are generally trained engineers, they
probably never studied enough mathematics (because engineering degrees are
brutally hard so when would they have had time?) to understand this.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 11 2013 @ 02:38 PM EDT |
"The courts are running around saying that algorithms aren't abstract if
they can be implemented on a physical computer and programming a computer makes
it a different machine. They don't have the basic concepts that they need to
deal with software patents. We are trying to give them a semiotic framework that
distinguishes between sign-vehicle, interpretant, and referent. And then we say
"
You are mus-interpreting the court.
When a court says something like "algorithms aren't abstract if they can be
implemented on a physical computer", the court isn't concluding a logical
analysis. Instead, it is defining or overloading if you will, the meaning of
the word abstract for its own use elsewhere in the ruling of the court. It
means, when we say abstract here we mean not to include algorithms that can be
implemented on a physical computer.
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