From D.E. Knuth’s famous letter to the United States Patent and Trademark Office:
“
I am told that the courts are trying to make a distinction between mathematical algorithms and nonmathematical algorithms. To a computer scientist, this makes no sense, because every algorithm is as mathematical as anything could be. An algorithm is an abstract concept unrelated to physical laws of the universe.
Nor is it possible to distinguish between “numerical” and “nonnumerical” algorithms, as if numbers were somehow different from other kinds of precise information. All data are numbers, and all numbers are data. Mathematicians work much more with symbolic entities than with numbers.
Therefore the idea of passing laws that say some kinds of algorithms belong to mathematics and some do not strikes me as absurd as the 19th century attempts of the Indiana legislature to pass a law that the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is exactly 3, not approximately 3.1416. It’s like the medieval church ruling that the sun revolves about the earth. Man-made laws can be significantly helpful but not when they contradict fundamental truths.
“
In those words of eloquent truth,
Beat Frost he did, Master Knuth.
Filed under: Computer Science, Poetry
I absolutely agree that patenting an algorithm is like patenting a mathematical formula itself, which is absurd. In this case, atleast the algorithm is known to public. But what worries me more than this is the companies releasing proprietary products based on some confidential algorithms. These algorithms may perform better than its contemporaries. No one outside would know these algorithms to use them differently or improve upon them. Ironically these capitalistic moves remind me of old USSR, where the knowledge of inventions was lost with the death of the inventors.
Arguably, the most important algorithm of the 20th century was the Fast Fourier Transform. John Tukey, who invented it and co-wrote the seminal paper on FFT, never even considered patenting this algorithm because he thought it was *obvious* to a mathematician.
As it turned out, British engineers had manually used it many years before him. And 100 years before that, Carl Frederich Gauss had invented this algorithm and the world ignored it because he wrote the paper in Latin.
It has been 10 years since Don wrote that letter. Larry Lessig and Co have been fighting a high profile battle. But Bush and his band of jokers are more interested in raping Mesopotamia.
And in the meanwhile, the Indian Government signed an agreement with the WTO 12 years ago that forced us to revise the Patent Act of 1970. Indian companies are now open to litigation for Product and Process patent violations from WTO member nations.
This has so far fscked up the business of Pharmaceuticals industries. Its impact on software patent violations will not be felt until an Indian company comes up with something that will threaten Microsoft / Apple / IBM / Google / Sun, at which point we will wake up with a jolt, too late to realize this is a nightmare we cannot get out of.