Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Judy arrays are patented

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 60 posts

Re: Judy arrays are patented

#51

Post by [deleted] »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #37
wheaties wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have said, it is not black and white. You can support patents on "things" and not patents on "ideas." There's a big difference. I can tell you mathematically how a windmill grinds corn but that does not make my description into a windmill. On the other hand, laying down the mathematical description of a Judy Array IS the array itself!

You're saying the description of how a windmill works is not a description of a windmill, while the description of how the array works is a array. How is that true? Isn't a description a model [1], never the thing itself? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_model

[deleted]

Re: Judy arrays are patented

#52

Post by BobWarfield »

nitrogen wrote: post #33
gojomo wrote: post #18

Unless you are a patent lawyer/expert specifically in someone's employ, pointing out that in your layman's opinion that "something appears to be patented" isn't doing anyone any favors, and may in fact be harming them. Patents use their own specific, strange language. The claims, as modified by other precedents, only apply in certain specific situations which may be different than what a casual reading would imply. A…

The fact that it takes a lawyer to even guess whether a patent applies, and that the typical strategy is to keep a low profile and hope nobody notices, is itself a serious flaw in the patent system. Any system in which it's impossible to predict ahead of time what is safe or legal is broken.

What a pity the lawyers have misinterpreted the patent to mean that the application's language itself should be non-obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art.

Re: Judy arrays are patented

#53

Post by jlgreco »

munchbunny wrote: post #47
taeric wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... I can patent complicated math? This is essentially what you are saying, right?

That's not what I'm saying and you know it. Please don't turn my point into a caricature. JPEG was patented. I can understand why. It was novel, it was not obvious, and it was useful. That trio makes a pretty good case for patentability, ignoring whether algorithms can/should be patented in general. From what I've read, Judy arrays are novel, not obvious (moreso than JPEG, in my subjective opinion), and useful. So it…

> It was novel, it was not obvious, and it was useful.

You could say the same of the Pythagorean theorem, or FFT. Thankfully in the case of the later, IBM's patent lawyers exhibited sanity.

Re: Judy arrays are patented

#54

Post by snogglethorpe »

beagle3 wrote: post #10
zrail wrote: post #4

This has been true for quite a long time, and IIRC is why they're not more widely used. That and they're pretty complicated to implement properly.

They are only better for some workloads and not others. e.g., they are excellent for accessing data in-order, but are worse than a very simple hash table for random access: http://preshing.com/20130107/this-hash-table-is-faster-than-... (yes, this hash table is vulnerable to timing attacks; point is, for many workloads Judy brings in considerable complexity but is actually inferior to other solutions).

Just an aside, but man, that's a refreshingly readable and pleasant article...

Re: Judy arrays are patented

#55

Post by munchbunny »

jlgreco wrote: post #50
munchbunny wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're calling it trivial with over 30 years of advancements in computer science behind you. Also, thanks for picking the shortest sample on the page to show that it's trivial. If it were trivial when the patentability question came up, it wouldn't have been a published paper in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and an active area of publication for at least the next six years. Whether or not it's trivial t…

All of those examples are trivial, they're all the same algorithm . I merely picked one of the more terse, which really has nothing to do with triviality. Seriously, read that. You're calling it trivial with over 30 years of advancements in computer science behind you. Yes, of course I fucking can. The ability to do that is part of what makes a "person having ordinary skill in the art" an important concept. Even 30 y…

You didn't read everything I said about software patents. I oppose software patents because I don't think our society needs them. But then again, you can try to pidgeonhole my opinion if you want to.

I'm talking about patents. You're answering that LZW is trivial today. Yes, it is, but the time difference is huge when you're talking about a patent that is 30 years old and now public domain, especially when you're talking about a "person having ordinary skill in the art" regarding a patent application.

The great thing about threads like this is that we probably agree on the key points, but it becomes a disagreement the moment you escalate your language.

Re: Judy arrays are patented

#56

Post by jlgreco »

munchbunny wrote: post #55
jlgreco wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those examples are trivial, they're all the same algorithm . I merely picked one of the more terse, which really has nothing to do with triviality. Seriously, read that. You're calling it trivial with over 30 years of advancements in computer science behind you. Yes, of course I fucking can. The ability to do that is part of what makes a "person having ordinary skill in the art" an important concept. Even 30 y…

You didn't read everything I said about software patents. I oppose software patents because I don't think our society needs them. But then again, you can try to pidgeonhole my opinion if you want to. I'm talking about patents. You're answering that LZW is trivial today. Yes, it is, but the time difference is huge when you're talking about a patent that is 30 years old and now public domain, especially when you're tal…

Both the LZW patents and the Judy array patents are software patents...

I am not saying that LZW patents were bad patents because LZW is or was trivial. I am saying that defending Judy array patents because of Judy arrays are hard to implement is foolish because no such defense can be mounted for LZW.

The reason both should be unpatentable is that they are both algorithms.

Re: Judy arrays are patented

#57

Post by munchbunny »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #43
jlgreco wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's impossible to grant some patents under subjective premises and be fair at the same time. Is that not the job of patent examiners?

Blaming it on the examiner is not the point. The idea behind patents is protecting the innovator. How does patent law protect anyone when it's trivial to argue a patent shouldn't have been granted in the first place (because it's not novel, or it's just math, blah blah)? You could say that about all patents ever filled. It defeats the whole purpose behind patents. Whoever has the biggest patent pool and deepest pocke…

Be careful. The idea behind patents and IP law in general isn't protecting the innovator. It's incentivizing the innovator to advance society through new ideas. The subtle difference is that, when society no longer benefits from protecting the "innovator", that person shouldn't get protection from IP law.

Unfortunately, IP law today is a perversion of this original principle.

Re: Judy arrays are patented

#59

Post by waps »

jlgreco wrote: post #34
nitrogen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that it takes a lawyer to even guess whether a patent applies, and that the typical strategy is to keep a low profile and hope nobody notices, is itself a serious flaw in the patent system. Any system in which it's impossible to predict ahead of time what is safe or legal is broken.

Not to mention the fact that engineers are routinely advised to never read patents, since doing so would increase liability when they inevitably independently reinvent the same obvious idea.

Humans are a learning algorithm in a body. Very, very few learning algorithms incorporate original thought, because it's computationally expensive. Extremely, extremely expensive. Genetic algorithms are close to the only ones and the best reason to use generic algorithms is when you have no example data whatsoever, and even with datacenters full of machines, a lot of patience is required. Otherwise, genetic algorithms are going to get clobbered in performance by almost every other algorithm.

Which brings me to my point : imho the chances that humans are capable of real original thought is nil. Don't get me wrong, humans are very capable of creatively combining ideas from very different disciplines and non-human sources to arrive at surprising insights and works. But I'm pretty sure humans are not in fact capable of creating something out of nothing, even when it comes to intellectual works.

Re: Judy arrays are patented

#60

Post by cma »

jlgreco wrote: post #32
cma wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A distinction without a difference.

You really don't see a difference? If I write out a book parametrization a Wankel engine and describing the chemistry and physics of the system necessary to make it turn, I have not implemented a Wankel engine, and I am in violation of no patents. It is a description of the engine, not an engine. A mathematical description of an algorithm can be executed . It is the algorithm. The description is an implementation and…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesi...
Post reply on HN