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In Accelerando by Charles Stross, the fictional venture altruist Manfred Macx "...patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain - not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible mousetraps."

Looks like we may not get the set of all possible mousetraps.

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Mousetraps do not depend on patents to exist. You can still have your mousetrap set, you just can't prevent others from re-deriving the same set.

The comment you are replying to was using mousetraps as a metaphor. ...at the end of the actual description of what it was talking about. It's an executive summary, not literally talking about mouse traps.

Specifically it was talking about arbitrary problem domains. So ... much more than mousetraps.

What makes you think this was unclear?

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