Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
more elements of the invention. For example, if we are designing a car
and we want to improve its acceleration, we might decide that we need to
use a larger engine, but that will increase the cost of the car. The net effect
will be that by creating more of something desirable (i.e., acceleration)
we are also adding more of something undesirable (i.e., cost) or perhaps
we would reduce the amount of some other desirable aspect of the prod-
uct. Altshuller referred to such tradeoffs as “technical contradictions”.
He also defined what he called “physical” or “inherent” contradictions,
where we may need both more and less of something, simultaneously.
For example, during a process to manufacture some sort of mixture, we
might need a higher temperature in order to melt a compound more
rapidly, but at the same time it could be necessary to lower the tempera-
ture in order to achieve a sufficiently homogeneous mixture. An inventor
might be faced with several such contradictions, for which the solutions
often come from employing a creative approach to the problems. But
finding a suitably creative approach is often difficult.
Altshuller and his friends scrutinized huge numbers of patent docu-
ments in order to discover what type of contradictions had been resolved
by each invention and the way this had been achieved. From this knowl-
edge, he developed a set of 40 inventive principles and subsequently a
matrix
of contradictions. Each row of the matrix corresponded to one
of 39 features that an inventor is typically attempting to improve by his
invention, such as speed, weight, accuracy of measurement, etc. Each
column of the matrix refers to a frequently occurring but undesirable
result, such as increased cost. Each cell in the matrix indicates those
principles that were most frequently described in the patent documents,
in order to resolve a contradiction.
Altshuller also studied the way that various technical systems had
been developed and improved over a period time. This led him to dis-
cover several trends, which he called the “laws of the evolution of tech-
nical systems”, that help engineers to predict what are the most likely
improvements that can be made to a given product. The most impor-
tant of these laws relates to what Altshuller described as the “ideality” of
a system, a qualitative ratio between the sum of all the desirable benefits
of the system and its cost or other negative effects. When an inventor
attempts to decide how to improve an invention, his goal is to increase
its ideality, either by increasing its beneficial features or decreasing its
cost or other negative effects, or possibly both. The utopian solution
