In case you haven’t come across it already, here’s google patent search: http://www.google.com/patents. It’s a lot easier than using the US patent office’s search form. Quite interesting — one gains a whole new appreciation for both the crackpots who take out patents for the most hare-brained ideas imaginable, and the patent lawyers who convert them into to unintelligible gibberish that can only be understood by other patent lawyers. Just an example:
3. The method as recited in claim 1, wherein the step of translating the command into at least one category includes the step of providing a plurality of models, each model being associated with a category, each category including a subset of formal language commands to narrow a search space for determining the formal language command corresponding to the input command.
If it weren’t for the abstract and the accompanying diagrams, I would go so far as to say that patents are utterly useless as documents for gaining insights into new inventions.
In any case I’m going to start going through some of the more interesting applications as soon as I get some time. Who knows what might come out of it. You know, Albert Einstein did a stint at the Swiss patent office…
