[nathanyz]

It is a hard idea to correlate since you can't unwind knowledge. I think your idea around giving a person X time to come up with solution could work if the patent office could afford that.

Maybe take a 3rd party who is unaware of the patent/novel idea and then asking them how to solve for some generalized version of the problem that a patent states it is solving and see what happens.

Similar to black boxing that companies will do with tech that may have been shared under restricted terms.

[simplestats]

I've been in the same niche for years and can certainly tell you what I could and couldn't figure out. There's no magic in what I do, else only 23 year-old geniuses who think outside the box would be dominating all the patents. Even nobel prizes are on average awarded for work done at middle age.

Just do peer review and get experts' opinions. Don't tell them how to make it work, just tell them what it does. E.g. make the inventor provide a carefuully-worded abstract. By the way patents that claim the category of problem itself as the invention (as opposed to the specific method for solving the problem) are another big problem that needs to be eliminated. Those broad first claims are the ones shot down in challenges. For example "use a computer to processs transactions", or even "use a convolutional network to classify faces". These are not inventions; they are problems that still need to be solved, and it can be done many ways.

Anyway if you're uncertain about 6-months, how can you justify giving them 20 years of monopoly?