Appeal No. 94-4400
Application 07/771,063
“control” nodes of Literati as interrogating each other because,
in both cases, all the nodes learn of each other’s status by way
of the TPNs. Although we agree that the control point nodes in
the applied prior art learn of the status of other control point
nodes by way of derived information, we cannot agree that the
interrogations as recited in claim 10 are suggested by Near or
Literati. In our view, the step of interrogating requires some
form of official or formal request to be made from one element to
another. The mere power to deduce what is going on within the
network does not constitute an interrogation as disclosed and
claimed.
There is no question that the nodes in Near and Literati
directly communicate only with nodes that are connectable by a
single link. That is, node G directly communicates with both
second master node H and third master node E whereas node F does
not directly communicate with any of the three master nodes [see
FIG. 2 of Literati]. None of the master nodes directly
communicate with any other master node. In our view, the fact
that any node in Literati can be traced to any other node by an
appropriate selection of links does not imply that an
interrogation occurs between those links. For example, second
master node H in Literati derives information about the status of
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