Gizmo invent Gizmo. The State of the Art in 1999, today and the future. submitted by Mr Ian Martin Ajzenszmidt

I have submitted the following article from the New York Times to stimulate interest and activity.

November 25, 1999 WHAT'S NEXT; When a Gizmo Can Invent a Gizmo By ANNE EISENBERG

IF Dr. Frankenstein's monster had published a best seller, who would have gotten the rights to that intellectual property?

His inventor up in the castle, of course.

Tough luck for the monster, but these are still early days for intellectual property rights for thinking machines. No one has seriously proposed that a computer should receive a share of the profits from an invention -- at least not yet. But other problems related to the ownership of items invented by computers are already being debated in preparation for the time, probably in about 10 years, when such inventions will be commonplace, said David E. Goldberg, an engineer and a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign.

Computers are already making inroads in the area of intellectual property as they design antennas, gas turbines and integrated circuits. Much of the work in this field of automatic discovery is preliminary and a lot of it is proprietary and therefore secret, but what can be seen provides tantalizing glimpses of a future in which computers work day and night -- no breaks for lunch -- to come up with original solutions with very little help from their programmers.

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iajzenszmi
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Computers might be programmed to explore a range of parameters for a design, but that is NOT DESIGN.

two key quotes:

  1. Dr. Koza and his colleagues have been creating electrical circuits using evolutionary computing. ''We recognize when these circuits infringe upon existing patented circuits because we know the existing circuits as textbook inventions,'' he said. ''But in our hundreds of runs, we've probably already invented many other circuits but haven't yet spotted them.''

IOW the human seems to be making the final decision.

  1. Many inventions in the future will routinely be handled by computers. ''No one would think of building a skyscraper with thousands of workers,'' Dr. Goldberg said. ''Similarly, no one will think about solving a problem without getting the magnitude of intellectual leverage that is similar to the mechanical leverage of the steam engine.''

No one says that because we use cranes to build a building that the cranes designed the building.

The real problem is this is all about the legal issue. Companies already own the patents derived from their engineers' inventions. Now they want to extend that reach to anyone's work that uses their computers and software. It is only a question of how much greed the legal system will allow.

Reply to
Ed Prochak

As long as humans are the consumers, it will stay like this. Machines designing and building products for other machines to buy is sci-fi territory: Stanislaw Lem or John Sladek. Sladek's _Mechasm_ is more openly hilarious, but it has society saved from the runaway system. In Lem's comedies, the system has become society.

Earlier this year Slashdot or some such mentioned a piece of research that could have been Dr. Koza's. Somebody was using genetic methods to develop an FPGA program for image recognition. The winner showed definite signs of alien design:

- when the program was copied into another FPGA chip, it didn't work.

- on examination, the program included clusters of interconnected gates with no obvious connection to the inputs or outputs. Reminiscent of junk DNA, except that if they were changed, the program stopped working.

Changing the margins of gates by drawing current in nearby circuit bits?? ??? Some newby designs brought to comp.arch.embedded show this kind of unearthly brilliance. (Mind you, however bad this would be in a product, it's very interesting as a research result.)

Maybe because I'm more firmly stuck in the software side than others in c.a.e I'm more impressed by things like this. It seems that right now we're seeing the results of society taken over by a runaway system for producing esoteric financial instruments of no use to anyone but the system itself. On the one hand, the BBB tranche of a CDO re-securitized and re-sliced for sale as AAA, AA, A, BBB grade securities; on the other an irreproducible FPGA program that works for no recognizable reason. Anybody see a difference? I/O bandwidth, maybe.

Mel.

Reply to
Mel

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