Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus is a method and device revealing
the relations between inventions by crawling through millions of patents
and their references.Patents are manifested thoughts or goals of the
inventor, thus reflecting the mindset society had at a certain point in
time. Much like scientific papers, patent documents contain references to
so-called “prior art”—thus pointing to the principles the invention is
based on. There are about 25 million references for the over 7.5 million
patents issued.
Because patents contain references, it is possible to find a path from one
patent to another. This principle corresponds to the “six degrees of
separation theory” (or small world phenomenon), according to which any
person in the world is connected to any other person by a surprisingly
short chain of acquaintanceships.
Applied to patents, the approximate level of separation is about seven nodes.The machine’s mechanism reproduces the patents and their relations in a never-ending stream of semantically connected drawings. Surprising connections between seemingly unrelated objects and ideas emerge.