
How Spellcheckers Work - pj
http://www.pcplus.co.uk/node/3062
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jefffoster
There's a really good article on writing a spell checker (with code) at
<http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html>.

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henning
This is how old school spell checkers that don't know what the heck to do with
proper nouns work.

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edw519
_In 1918, Robert Russell and Margaret Odell devised and patented an algorithm
for approximating and encoding the phonetic value of a word._

Nice to know that patent insanity isn't a new thing.

~~~
pj
One of my friends is an IP attorney and I had a conversation with him about
the ridiculousness of patent law and software and his response to me was, "I
think one of the problems with software engineers and patents is their over-
estimation of 'obviousness'."

What he meant was that we can look at something and quickly reverse engineer
the logic to construct it, but coming up with the idea originally is often
much more difficult than the simple patented solution would indicate. That's
what we do right? We take difficult concepts and distill them into solutions.

Realize, this algorithm was developed in 1918. Try rewinding your mind to what
the world knew back then and this algorithm may have been ground breaking!

A lot of us hackers think these problems are easy to solve when really, we
never even realized before we saw the solution that it was a problem at all!
Another issue is that we often, through modesty, humility, or a lack of self-
awareness really under-appreciate how smart we really are -- relative to the
population as a whole. We judge ourselves compared to other hackers and the
other brilliant people we work with over the years. We isolate ourselves from
the masses to a large degree and so we think we aren't as smart as we are or
our ideas and solutions and our inventions really aren't as unique and
innovative as they are. Most of the things we take for granted are really far
beyond what the vast majority of the world even remotely considers or ever
will consider for the entirety of their lives.

~~~
sorbits
Is your friend of the belief that ideas should be patentable?

That I can use any idea I want to “build my product” is what has allowed our
society to evolve to where we are. And when I grab a dozen ideas from the
public domain I will refine these, maybe add a few of my own (original) ideas
to the mix, and in turn inspire others.

I actually know of one original idea I had which has inspired the creation of
other products, and I am honestly happy about that. This is how things should
work! Also, this “original” idea of mine was really just taking an idea from
another domain and use it in another context :)

