
Ask HN: Who has sold an algorithm and how? - daniel-cussen
Can anyone point me to a person that has successfully sold an algorithm, a general algorithm, for an appropriate amount of money?  How did the transaction take place?  What would an algorithm writer need to do before the transaction?  Take PageRank.  Larry and Sergey were unable to sell it as an algorithm or even as a website.  What should they have done, short of starting Google, to get a fraction of the proceeds for a (surely different) fraction of the work?
======
secondtimeuse
In some cases, you can patent a major application for that algorithm and then
license that patent. From what I know Larry and Sergey patented PageRank for
Web Search. My advisor has patent on a Graph Cuts algorithm for image
segmentation, which is licensed by Cornell. If you have a fast matrix
multiplication algorithm e.g. for use in Fully Connected layers for Neural
Nets. You can patent that application. When FB hired people from NYU to work
on deep learning, the acquisition involved getting a fast fourier transform
optimized version of convolutional layers. Not sure how big of a component it
was.

------
daniel-cussen
OP here. So one algo I have is fast matrix multiplication algorithm,
especially for sparse matrices. Faster asymptotically and in real-time than
what's out there, and with better accuracy.

~~~
malisper
What do you mean by "with better accuracy"? How can one matrix multiplication
algorithm be more accurate than another?

~~~
daniel-cussen
Strassen makes your rounding errors bigger the more levels of recursion you
do. We're talking ~7 bits of error due to rounding (in a paper I read).

------
meeper16
Hedge fund algorithm developer here. I've sold a few of these but it's mainly
been based on taking 20% of the net profit and largely confined to the
financial industry.

~~~
ghrifter
I'm interested in some financial programming. Does everyone use Haskell or
other functional languages? Where can I learn some basics?

~~~
rgovind
How about this?

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/computational-
investing](https://www.coursera.org/learn/computational-investing)

