> Software is not math! [...] its like saying all biology is just complex physics.
I hear you, and I agree with your points. But this general idea isn't exactly what I was talking about, and I don't draw such a hard line, personally. I did say that software was both method and apparatus, and I feel like you might have overlooked the apparatus part. Math has been normally viewed as only method and no apparatus. But this all really depends on what software and what math we're talking about.
I'm claiming that for the purposes of evaluating patent criteria, it's becoming more difficult over time to draw a line between math and software, not less, and I stand by that. It's possible to use math for what should be patentable inventions, and it's possible to use software to represent mathematical statements that should not be patentable.
Software to evaluate PDEs by numerical method, or to integrate expressions symbolically, is hard to say it's not math. Software to send email is harder to say it's math, except that unlike biology, we know the mathematical details of every step along the way, whether it's character encodings or network routing or spam detection or UI.
The distance between software and pure math in my mind is a lot shorter than the distance between biology and physics. But I agree that there is distance in both cases. The argument that software is math is (I think) easier to make, due to Turing and to the fact that we turn our code explicitly into binary math and CPUs only consist of arithmetic operations on numbers. The abstraction doesn't yet seem big enough to separate them.
I hear you, and I agree with your points. But this general idea isn't exactly what I was talking about, and I don't draw such a hard line, personally. I did say that software was both method and apparatus, and I feel like you might have overlooked the apparatus part. Math has been normally viewed as only method and no apparatus. But this all really depends on what software and what math we're talking about.
I'm claiming that for the purposes of evaluating patent criteria, it's becoming more difficult over time to draw a line between math and software, not less, and I stand by that. It's possible to use math for what should be patentable inventions, and it's possible to use software to represent mathematical statements that should not be patentable.
Software to evaluate PDEs by numerical method, or to integrate expressions symbolically, is hard to say it's not math. Software to send email is harder to say it's math, except that unlike biology, we know the mathematical details of every step along the way, whether it's character encodings or network routing or spam detection or UI.
The distance between software and pure math in my mind is a lot shorter than the distance between biology and physics. But I agree that there is distance in both cases. The argument that software is math is (I think) easier to make, due to Turing and to the fact that we turn our code explicitly into binary math and CPUs only consist of arithmetic operations on numbers. The abstraction doesn't yet seem big enough to separate them.