Appeal No. 1998-0706
Application 08/166,279
means.' (claim 17, line[s] 23-26)" (Brief at 15) fails to
address the examiner's reliance on Allen's disclosure of
selecting the shortest path (col. 1, ll. 67-68).
In view of appellants' failure to demonstrate any
error in the rejection of claim 17, we are affirming the
rejection of that claim.
Independent claim 20 recites that the interconnect means
includes routing table means for identifying the shortest
route to a destination processor. Appellants, after correctly
noting that the decision about direction is made in Allen's
individual processors, argues that "adding a routing table to
Allen's cluster module adds nothing (and for this reason,
Applicants submit, the motivation to combine Allen with Bione
is not suggested by either Allen or Bione)" (Brief at 15).
This "adds nothing" argument is unconvincing because it
misconstrues the examiner's position to be that it would have
been obvious to add a direction-determining capability to
Allen's cluster modules without removing that capability from
the individual processors. The examiner has instead proposed
to move that capability from the individual processors to the
cluster modules in order to reduce the number of distributed
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