Download Inventing Software: The Rise of Computer-Related Patents by Kenneth Nichols PDF

By Kenneth Nichols

Since the creation of private desktops, software program has emerged as a driver within the international economic climate and an important in its personal correct. in this time, the U.S. govt has reversed its past coverage opposed to software program patents and is now issuing hundreds of thousands of such patents every year, frightening heated controversy between programmers, legal professionals, students, and software program businesses. This publication is the 1st to step open air of the highly-polarized debate and consider the present country of the legislation, its suitability to the realities of software program improvement, and its implications for day by day software program development.

Written by way of a former legal professional and dealing software program developer, Inventing Software offers a finished evaluation of software program patents, from the lofty views of criminal background and computing thought to the technical info and problems with real patents. humans drawn to the criminal point of software program patents will locate specified technical research of exact patented software program, the criminal options in the back of the wording of the patents, and an research of the benefit or hassle of detecting infringements. software program builders will locate how you can combine patent making plans into their ordinary software program engineering practices, and a pragmatic consultant for learning and appraising their rivals' patents and safeguarding the worth in their personal. meant essentially for programmers and software program executives and executives, Inventing Software can also be worthy, illuminating interpreting for legal professionals and software program corporation investors.

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Suppose, for example, that a particular computer system is able to understand colloquial English sentences and act on them. " and the computer replies, "The captain is on the holodeck," then my original question is a program that has 42 Inventing Software caused the computer to produce a useful response. This may seem to be a trivial example, but a verbal description of a complex problem, which is then solved by the computer, would be within the capability of any system that could extract the problem from the human-language presentation.

4 Although recursion is a powerful tool, it is more difficult to understand a heavily recursive program than an iterative one: "LISP is a terrible language to program with: Its basic structure is conceptually opaque, the flow of control through nested function calls, rather than sequentially from one statement to the next, is difficult to follow" (Partridge 1991). Another property of LISP is that, as in Smalltalk, programs can modify themselves. Unlike Smalltalk, however, the self-modification facility is integral to LISP's Al mission, for Al programs often need to "learn," that is, to adapt themselves to changing circumstances.

We now have languages for writing algorithms that look very different from a sequence of steps. For instance, in some program- Algorithms, Inventions, and Software 41 ming systems one simply provides a set of constraints that are to be satisfied by the ultimate actions, and the interpreter (or compiler) determines what actions are needed to satisfy them, and then executes them. A set of constraints does not look like a step-by-step procedure, but it is just as good as one, because it determines the steps.

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