In part 1, I offered the opinion that the important part of intellectual property is the order of the 'atoms' - the basic units, be they musical notes or bytes of code.

So how is it that some people come to find the uncommon, and unusually valuable patterns, and many don't? We are all, after all, walking around with the most evolved pattern-recognition system on the planet, and maybe the universe, sitting on our shoulders.

Part of the answer is that the usual noise operates here: some are lucky, some are more gifted, some people discover great things at the wrong time, some discover mediocre things at fortuitous times, some have better marketing etc. etc. So understanding that order is the magic ingredient doesn't just solve the problem of creating value out of thin air, which is the essence of IP.

What it does suggest is that there may be non-intuitive strategies for uncovering the most useful orders. It might, for example, be informative to try large sets of different orders in a Darwinian competition to see which ones seem to fill the bill best - whether that means 'appealing to teenagers' or 'crunching numbers faster and more accurately'.

Indeed, there is a music service now that compares new songs to a database of hits and tries to divine if the patterns in the new tune are more or less like songs that have been successful before. And it's not likely IMHO that invention will be able to proceed based strictly on automated processes trying large numbers of things.

The state space of almost any field - music, literature, code - is incredibly huge, and not susceptible to a 'brute force attack' in any timeframe that is likely to be useful - like a human lifetime. But it is possible that our superb pattern-recognition machinery could do better with some tools to help cull the field down to a more manageable size. It would be interesting to see what a meta-pattern software tool would look like... one that could compare any construct against any other...is there a common thread between, say Linux and Mozart?
Comments 10:11:56 AM    

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