I’ll be straight with you here: This whole application is a mess and I don’t rightly know what is going on. But if confusion is the spice of life, then this one is red hot like pizza supper!
To start with, this application purports to describe an artificial intelligence that is “thousands of times smarter than human beings.” After musing on the nature of human psychic abilities, “There is no prior art that relates to robots that have psychic abilities.” I think they may have been correct about that, at least.
The “time machine” in this case is supposed to be a perfect simulation of the world, which our “human robot” can use to predict future events. And all you have to do is…
But let’s get to the good stuff: Robots With Psychic Abilities!
The present invention allows a robot to have psychic abilities. The robot’s psychic abilities have several steps. First, the robot predicts the future. Then, it will extract specific data from future pathways and insert them as element objects in the robot’s conscious. From previous patent applications, the conscious works by: recognizing target objects from the environment and gathering all element objects associated with each target object. All element objects gathered from all target objects will compete with one another to be activated in the mind.
USPP 2008/0281766, ¶133
And of course, these psychic abilities depend on the function of the time machine. But what is time, anyway?
No one really knows what the 4th dimension is. Some people think the 4th dimension is time, but I doubt that. The 4th dimension is probably another world similar to our own. Wither this world is 3-d, 4-d or 5-d, I’m not sure. There are probably intelligent beings in this 4th dimension. What they look like I really don’t know—they can be aliens with 60 different senses and have intelligence thousands of times smarter than a human being.
USPP 2008/0281766, ¶250
Unfortunately for our poor inventor, the examiner spent eight pages explaining in gory detail why the whole thing was nonsense. For example, the Examiner states:
Further, claim 1 is indefinite because it recites the term “time machine”. The Applicant states (at [0049]) that this “time machine is equivalent to the ‘computer generated dream world’ in the Matrix movie or the holodeck in Star Trek.” However, these works of science fiction do not adequately convey the scope of their time machine devices (which, by the way, are imaginative), and the Applicant does not fill this gap with further description in the Specification. One of ordinary skill in the art would not understand the scope of this limitation without further guidance.
U.S. Pat. Appl. No. 12/135,132, Office Action dated Sep. 29, 2011, p. 9.
I have to imagine that the Examiner enjoyed writing this rejection. The inventor unfortunately never responded, perhaps having found a more receptive medium. Specifically, comic books!
Patenting the odd, the impossible, and the unnerving 