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3 comments:
RE "Evolving to circumvent patents." Many years ago, I attended a talk by the spectroscopist Tomas Hirschfeld, who had used a crude form of this.
He had been hired to come up with a fast way to determine the protein content of grain (much faster than wet chemistry). So he took infrared spectra of a lot of grain samples whose protein content was determined the old-fashioned way, and wrote a program to evolve a way to predict the protein from the spectra. He said that the program came up with a method that was good enough for his employer, and that he would never even have thought to try.
He put up a slide of the title page of the paper he published on the method, pointed at his name as the sole author, and said "But I'm taking all the credit, because I am NOT going down in history as the first person to co-author a paper with an IBM 4341!"
MHA... That story on the "Secret war of the French, down below, was excellent. Wonder why the "Times" doesn't pick up on that.... oh... never-mind.
Thanks for these!
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