Appeal No. 1998-1903
Application No. 08/353,258
Aleksander explains that both the binary code and the Gray
code have problems with the Hamming distance, and, whereas the
bar code overcomes Hamming distance problems, it is
inefficient and requires a large amount of input space.
Each of independent claims 1, 12, 14, and 21 requires the
code used for encoding to be redundant and the relationship of
the input signal value Hamming distance to the input signal
value distance to have a mean slope greater than 1. Neither
the binary code nor the Gray code is redundant, as recognized
by the examiner (Final Rejection, page 4). Nonetheless, the
examiner concludes (Final Rejection, pages 4-5), that a Gray
code satisfies the claimed code, since a Gray code has the
claimed "normalized Hamming distance to normalized signal
distance relationship" and "is more efficient than the
redundant code." The examiner further contends (Answer, page
4) that "the redundant code as claimed does not patentably
distinguish over the Gray code, and the invention would
perform equally well with the Gray code," since the redundant
code does not "provide any improvement over the Gray code in
the classification of input patterns."
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