[dusted]

that's not really going to work though.. there have been (and must still be) tons of "obvious" solutions to well-known problems..

So if you could simply "give a bunch of experts the claims in the patent" and have them actually come up with something.. Well, then it'd be trivial to simply rewrite existing unsolved problems in "claim of method to solve problem" and they'd magically be able to solve it?

The problem is that obvious solutions become obvious only when they arrive, and not before.

Even framing a problem so that it can be solved is an example of this.. There are lots of problems that only appear after their solution. Before the solution, they weren't problems, but simply "how things are". Like, right now, we've not solved death, so for most people, it's not really a problem, it's just how things are.. If we solve death, future people will look back at us in disbelief: (You try to tell me people just DIED? and the entire world didn't unite to fix that? what the fuck was wrong with them? guess they got what they deserved..)

[phicoh]

I'm just saying, that if your claims have obvious solutions, then the community has no need for your patent. The patent has to solve something that is not obvious.

For the community, it is only worth granting a patent if the community gets something back in return. And that is, solving a problem we don't know how to solve. Obviously, that can be with efficiency parameters. If the simple solution is 50% efficient and the patent claims 90%. That may be worth the patent. And everybody else can keep using the 50% efficient solution.

In your example, if you now come up with a patent that solves death, then no expert will be able to find a solution in reasonable period.

If you can then show a working version that solves death, even if it is completely obvious in retrospect, it is worth a patent.