Gizmo invent Gizmo. The State of the Art in 1999, today and

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.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D04EEDB1F3CF936A15752C1A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print

 

[Ed Prochak]

On Nov 27, 2:00 pm, iajzens...@gmail.com wrote:

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.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D04EEDB1F3CF936A15752....

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

two key quotes:

1. <q> 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.'' </q>

IOW the human seems to be making the final decision.

2. <q> 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.'' </q>

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.

 

[Mel]

Ed Prochak wrote:

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

two key quotes:

1. <q> 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.'' </q

IOW the human seems to be making the final decision.

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.