Appeal No. 1999-2702
Application No. 08/509,867
The examiner does a thorough identification of all terms and teachings within the
four corners of Phillips which are applied against the claimed invention. Here, the
examiner relies on the background of the invention section, the preferred embodiment
section and the claimed invention of Phillips, but in our view, this rises to more than a
single teaching within Phillips, and the examiner has not provided any analysis of why one
skilled in the art would have generalized the specific cyclic permutation taught in the
preferred embodiment to achieve the permutations recited in the instant claim 1.
Furthermore, the disclosure of Phillips requires more than a basic familiarity of the IBM
370 mainframe computer and its functionality with respect to the “gather” and “spread”
functions. In our view, this knowledge or familiarity would have been more than could be
considered as inherent in the teachings of Phillips. Therefore, we find that the teachings of
Phillips alone is not a sufficient teaching to rise to the level of an anticipatory reference as
the examiner maintains.
Appellant argues that the issue is more than just whether Phillips discloses that any
permutation can be generated, but whether Phillips teaches an apparatus for generating a
general permutation in a single instruction as required by claim 1. (See reply brief at page
3). We do not fully agree with appellant’s argument whereas the language of claim 1 does
not require a “single instruction.” The language of claim 1 merely recites that “an
instruction.” Therefore, this argument is not persuasive.
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