"All war is deception", this according to Sun Tzu's The Art of War. An inventor from Indiana, Anthony Dewayne Johnson, recently published a patent application that takes this teaching to heart,  US20190033781A1 Special holographic security systems and similar holographic defense systems. Saving lives and improving the effectiveness of home, commercial and military security systems is the primary goal of Johnson's 2019 application.

The home and commercial applications are designed to augment existing security systems. In addition to monitoring an area and communicating with law enforcement, the holographic security system provides visual and audio warnings. Pre-programmed images and sounds can be presented to frighten intruders, such as the resident, a security guard or a barking dog. In addition, the representations can be linked to remote devices, like  a smartphone, and provide real-time communication with the threat, i.e., "I've called the police" or "Do you feel lucky? Well, do you, punk?"

  ​


​

​

















Negan just killed a major character on "The Walking Dead" or Jack just suffered a major heart attack on "This Is Us", which commercial should follow such an emotional scene? Choose right and you've connected with the viewer on a deep, emotional level. Choose wrong and your product may be seen as incongruent, in bad taste, or worse, simply forgotten. 
​

Of the 4,070 patents that issued today, these two stand out:

Shortest pendency: 116 days (0.3 years) US10,178,908B1
Longest pendency: 5,296 days (14.5 years) US 10,179,935 B2

​US 10,178,908 B1, Storage rack, was filed last September, 9/19/2018, and lists Chun-hsien Tseng as the sole inventor with Chin JWU Enterprise CO assignee. From the abstract, "A hexagon storage rack includes a top wall, a bottom wall, two upper side walls, and two lower side walls"

US 10,179,935 B2, Markers for detection of gastric cancer, was filed 7/16/2004. A little over a week later, John Kerry will tap John Edwards as his running mate for his Presidential campaign. Invented by Parry John Guilford and Andrew John Holyoake of Dunedin, NZ, assigned to Pacific Edge LTD, the '935 patent tests for GTM gene family proteins as a marker for gastric tumors.

"You're driving too fast", "Don't turn here, the next one", "I think you missed a pothole back there", "We can walk to the curb from here" - All helpful suggestions from people not tasked with driving the car. How will an autonomous driving system interact, process, weigh and respond to  passenger preferences?

Enter US10173667B2, Occupant based vehicle control. Just granted last week, 1/8/2019, and filed 6/19/2017, this ELWHA LLC patent monitors a vehicles' occupants and modifies the driving experience.

US20150013737 A1 Portable Personal Seating Barrier
Inventor: Daly, Lisa Margaret
Filed: 2014-01-31 Published: 2015-01-15

Problem: Public spaces and public transportation can be too crowded and encroach on a person's personal space.

Solution:  A barrier which defines a space for the user and restricts sensory feedback (e.g., visual, touch, and/or auditory feedback) from others.

The application includes an embodiment for the use of "antibacterial, antimicrobial, antifungal" materials separating the user from others. A much needed feature as the application points out regarding public transportation,

"One seated passenger may eat, engage in personal grooming, cough, sneeze, physically rub against, stare, and otherwise provide unwanted stimuli to the person beside whom they are seated. There have even been cases of passengers urinating on bench seats with the urine running onto the seat and person seated next to them and of passengers vomiting and bleeding on passengers seated beside them."

Checkers had Chinook,  Chess had Deep Blue and Jeopardy had Watson. Now Texas Hold'em has CFR+. A group from the University of Alberta in Canada have developed a new algorithm that may put most human players on tilt. 

A recent IEEE Spectrum article, Computers Conquer Texas Hold'em Poker for First Time, introduces CFR+, an updated version of a technique called counterfactual regret minimization (CFR) for playing heads-up no-limit Texas Hold'em. Finally, a way to minimize the regret I feel each and everytime I don't fold 7-2 off suit.

From a game theory perspective, heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em is an "imperfect-information game" due to the two hidden cards each player holds. This missing information increases the number of steps required at each decision point and can require as much as 262 terabytes of memory. CFR+, the new hyper efficient version of CFR, eliminates some of the steps and by applying compression reduces the memory requirements to below 20 terabytes.