In my lifetime, folklore claimed abstract ideas were never patentable. That's why the patent on Matthew Cook's proof of Turing-completeness of Rule 110 seemed so outrageous . . . and which I hope will now be declared null and void. --Dan On Jun 19, 2014, at 11:54 AM, Michael Kleber <michael.kleber@gmail.com> wrote:

There is a sense in which this is a really incredible statement about the difference between the world we live in today and one of N years ago. Once upon a time, turning an abstract idea into a machine capable of executing on it required serious invention. The age of the general-purpose computer means that serious invention has already happened. Changing a way to do something into a machine which does it is simply no longer an interesting problem.

--Michael

On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 2:36 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:

...

Hopefully, today's Supreme Court decision will have the effect of slowing down substantially the issuing of bad software patents.

Simply expressing an algorithm in computer code doesn't make it patentable, unless the algorithm itself is patentable.

Abstract ideas aren't patentable, so abstract ideas embedded in computer code aren't patentable.

Judge Randall Rader, the ex-Chief of the patent court, already embarrassed by ethics violations, is spanked unanimously by the Supremes in today's opinion; he is leaving that court at the end of the month.

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-298_7lh8.pdf

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/13/us-usa-court-ip-idUSKBN0EO2OO20140...

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Or maybe it was never patented per se, but Wolfram's asserted proprietary ownership of the fact strikes me as the equivalent of a patent.

Are you talking about US Patent 8,692,575 ? Whit

DA> That's why the patent on Matthew Cook's proof of DA> Turing-completeness of Rule 110 seemed so outrageous DA> . . . and which I hope will now be declared null and void. DA> * * * DA> Or maybe it was never patented per se, but Wolfram's asserted DA> proprietary ownership of the fact strikes me as the equivalent of DA> a patent. DA> Is [US Patent 8,692,575] this one: DA> "A family of self-timed, charge-conserving asynchronous logic DA> elements that interact with their nearest neighbors permits design DA> and implementation of circuits that are asynchronous at the bit level. DA> The elements pass information by means of state tokens, rather than DA> voltages. Each cell is self-timed, so no hardware non-local connections DA> are needed. ..." Yes. It appears to be about circuits for implementing cellular automata. It mentions Cook's paper on Rule 110 at the bottom of column 5 but it doesn't seem to assert any coverage of the rule or the proof of its universality. I have looked no deeper than Wikipedia on Matthew Cook and his dispute with Wolfram but I don't see anything patent-like about it. It seems like an ordinary dispute about the ownership of intellectual work. I am inferring that Wolfram supported Cook's research and asserted his right to block publication of the results until they had appeared in Wolfram's own book. Whit