Examples of Statements of Human-Competitiveness using the 8 Criteria

Last updated July 20, 2008

An automatically created result is considered “human-competitive” if it satisfies at least one of the eight criteria below.

(A) The result was patented as an invention in the past, is an improvement over a patented invention, or would qualify today as a patentable new invention.

(B) The result is equal to or better than a result that was accepted as a new scientific result at the time when it was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

(C) The result is equal to or better than a result that was placed into a database or archive of results maintained by an internationally recognized panel of scientific experts.

(D) The result is publishable in its own right as a new scientific result ¾ independent of the fact that the result was mechanically created.

(E) The result is equal to or better than the most recent human-created solution to a long-standing problem for which there has been a succession of increasingly better human-created solutions.

(F) The result is equal to or better than a result that was considered an achievement in its field at the time it was first discovered.

(G) The result solves a problem of indisputable difficulty in its field.

(H) The result holds its own or wins a regulated competition involving human contestants (in the form of either live human players or human-written computer programs).

The following are examples of statements of human-competitiveness using the 8 criteria.

EXAMPLE OF A “STATEMENT” USING CRITERIA A & F

This is an illustrative  example of a “statement” as to which an entry in the competition should be considered to be “human-competitive.”

Harry Jones of The Brown Instrument Company of Philadelphia patented the PID-D2 controller topology in 1942. The PID topology was a significant invention in the field of control engineering and is in industrial use today. The PID-D2 controller was an improvement over the PID controller patented in 1939 by Callender and Stevenson. Because the genetically evolved controller  has proportional, integrative, derivative, and second derivative blocks, it infringes the 1942 Jones patent. Referring to the eight criteria for establishing that an automatically created result is competitive with a human-produced result, the rediscovery by genetic programming of the PID-D2 controller satisfies the following two of the eight criteria:

(A) The result was patented as an invention in the past, is an improvement over a patented invention, or would qualify today as a patentable new invention.

(F) The result is equal to or better than a result that was considered an achievement in its field at the time it was first discovered.

The rediscovery by genetic programming of the PID-D2 controller came about six decades after Jones received a patent for his invention. Nonetheless, the fact that the original human-designed version satisfied the Patent Office’s criteria for patent-worthiness means that the genetically evolved duplicate would also have satisfied the Patent Office’s criteria for patent-worthiness (if only it had arrived earlier than Jones’ patent application).

ADDITIONAL EXAMPLE OF A “STATEMENT” USING CRITERIA B, D, E, F & G

This is another illustrative example of a “statement” as to which an entry in the competition should be considered to be “human-competitive.”

The 1942 Ziegler-Nichols tuning rules for PID controllers were a significant development in the field of control engineering. These rules have been in widespread use since they were invented. The 1995 Åström-Hägglund tuning rules were another significant development. They outperform the 1942 Ziegler-Nichols tuning rules on the industrially representative plants used by Åström and Hägglund. Åström and Hägglund developed their improved tuning rules by applying mathematical analysis, shrewdly chosen approximations, and considerable creative flair. The genetically evolved PID tuning rules are an improvement over the 1995 Åström-Hägglund tuning rules. Referring to the eight criteria for establishing that an automatically created result is competitive with a human-produced result, the creation by genetic programming of improved tuning rules for PID controllers satisfies the following five of the eight criteria:

(B) The result is equal to or better than a result that was accepted as a new scientific result at the time when it was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

(D) The result is publishable in its own right as a new scientific result—independent of the fact that the result was mechanically created.

(E) The result is equal to or better than the most recent human-created solution to a long-standing problem for which there has been a succession of increasingly better human-created solutions.

(F) The result is equal to or better than a result that was considered an achievement in its field at the time it was first discovered.

(G) The result solves a problem of indisputable difficulty in its field.

EXAMPLE OF SOMETHING THAT MAY BE “DIFFICULT,” BUT NOT “HUMAN-COMPETITIVE”

Although the solution produced by genetic and evolutionary computation for this problem is, in fact, better than a human-produced solution, that fact alone does not qualify the result as “human-competitive” under the eight criteria for human-competitiveness. For example, the fact that a problem appears in a college textbook is not alone sufficient to establish the problem’s difficulty or importance or “human-competitiveness.” A result is “human-competitive” if it satisfies one or more of the 8 criteria listed above. A textbook problem might, or might not, satisfy one or more of the eight criteria.