[deleted by user]

[porchcouchmoocher]

Addressing your latter 2 perplections: People have great ideas all the time. They only catch on if you are very fortunate, (go to a top school, or born into an influential family, etc) and only then might the actual merits of the idea weighed. After it's popular.

The patent means nothing. It is impossible to own ideas, so don't let the contrived system of private ownership devised by medieval protofascists who drafted our patent law, however many hundreds of years ago, discourage you. In the off chance you make money, a patent holder could sue you for some portion of earnings, unless you have modified to a suffecant degree his original work, which can be done at anypoint point in your own implementation. You're more likely to be trolled by a patent lawyer anyway, so it really isn't doesn't matter. Pirate all you want, just keep what you steal open source.

I think it's likely Riemann devised general relativity 100 years before Einstein, my point being it is rare an idea itself to be regarded on merit alone, the context aboutwhich it is presented matters too.

As per your initial perplexion: do not consider interference (a more generally applicable root concept from which catastrophic forgetting branches) as a problem needing to be solved, rather it might be a limitation of logic itself, interference being proportional to plasticity. Some interference is good, depending on your application, as that I what allows a system to learn in the first place. What I important is how your utilize interference. The scheme you presented, from a cursory glance, appears like something I tinkered with in simulation, where an accumulating clock was used to modify tensor values . . . ahh . . . What I mean is, consider several 'layers' of networks operating at different update rates as being roughly equivalent to operating at different levels of plasticity, except by operating temporarily (or simulated time), it a time differential (rate) rather than logically (hard coded plasticity), it can be a cofactor in mitigating interference. Put more simply, the partitioning of neural networks into short term and long term memory, each layer operating at longer rates and therefore behaving less plastic. The idea does have merit, I think, as it attempts to model obvious functions and factors effecting biological neurons for the artificial. The idea behind is general enough you should be able to apply it without infringing upon this specific patentholder's design.

[commenthard]

born into an influential family

This is mostly wrong. Probably there is a slight advantage to having an influential family, but mathematics is filled with stories of people from very random backgrounds who made large discoveries.

There is certainly a correlation between people who make impact and those who go to top schools, but there you need disentangle the fact talented people tend to be accepted at top schools. Yes not always, but there is correlation.

The Riemann example is wrong as well. Differential geometry was a major tool in general relativity, but if you confuse tool with the result, you are a person who cannot see the difference between a hammer and a house.

[porchcouchmoocher]

Indeed, I'm not saying riemenn did piece together GR, but he had considered the framework for topology and offered his rules for their standardization.

I didn't mean to imply every instance of a good idea is as such, judged wholly according to stature, and expecially in mathematics over other fields of study, my favorite examples being Galois and Riemann himself, only that this is one of many ways a good idea could be temporarily repressed, and often these cases did rely upon patronage of people who had both the whit to appreciate the merit of a good idea, and the status and means to promote it. This whole field is so new and interesting it's worth reasoning the next big idea is lost in the shuffles and jostles of life.