
Donald Knuth: Mathematical Ideas, or Algorithms, Should Not Be Patented - Anon84
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090603224807259
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mahmud
U.S. patent 1,048,576 1970 January 1. "A method for distributed editing of
publications with micropayment incentives", Knuth D. E.

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bk
Good find, but a man can change his mind. Also, given the existing patent
system, you're practically forced to seek patents to avoid getting trolled.

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mahmud
Good find?

[Edit: I just picked a computationally relevant number that approximates the
patent counter circa the epoch.]

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omail
Way off. That patent is from 1912.

[http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=1,048,576.PN.&OS=PN/1,048,576&RS=PN/1,048,576)

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randallsquared
Right order of magnitude; close enough. ;)

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pixcavator
>Surely nobody could apply mathematics if it were necessary to pay a license
fee whenever the theorem of Pythagoras is employed.

I’ve seen this argument why algorithms and mathematics shouldn’t be patentable
before. A fact that is always overlooked is that this hypothetical patent
would have expired sometime in the 5th century BC. To make this argument one
would have to find more recent examples. How about anything created within the
last 20 years? In my view, the greatest things aren’t practical to be
patentable and the practical ones aren’t anywhere close in magnitude to the
Pythagorean Theorem. So, where is the problem? And by the way, comparing
algorithms to "words" (in this context) is just silly, with all due respect to
Knuth.

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stonemetal
Exactly, at one point in time the ball point pen was patented, You couldn't
make a ball point pen without paying someone.

How is the fruit of my labor any different from the fruit of a ME EE or
ChemE's labor? The lot of us practice applied math in different domains.

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ZachPruckowski
A patent on a ball-point pen only affects how you make your pen. A company can
make a competing, non-ballpoint pen that still writes on the same paper and is
still the same color (though it might be more expensive or messier or
whatever), so not licensing the patent isn't disastrous. Even with a patent on
something like an engine, I can still design my own (likely less efficient)
engine, which'll still drive on the same roads and probably even use the same
gasoline that works slightly differently.

A patent on something like MP3 or One-Click-Ordering prevents competitors from
including a feature. If I want to make an e-commerce site, I have to have
multiple clicks to order something or I have to license Amazon's patent. If I
want to make any sort of media hardware or software that can encode/decode or
import/export or even play the content out there, I need a slew of patents
licensed. There's no work-around or alternative method, I simply can't include
that feature without licensing.

It's the difference between "licensing this patent lets me build off the work
of another company to make my product better" and "licensing this patent is
mandatory to compete in this field". In my mind, patents of the first type are
fine, while patents of the second type are bad.

I should be able to create something that can (for example) play MP3s without
licensing, but do so at the cost of efficiency or power (because I'm using a
less effective method).

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helveticaman
Protip: for those who have only read about him, his name is pronounced "ca-
nuth." The K is not silent. I learned this the embarrassing way.

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euroclydon
I really would like to see algorithms black-boxed rather than patented. I
should be able to reap the benefits of figuring the same thing out on my own
some time later than a competitor did.

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logic
You've just explained the difference between a patent and a trade secret. :)

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10ren
I know Knuth for his _The Art of Computer Programming_ and TeX, and he's
clearly amazingly smart - I'm curious about what algorithms he has invented,
for what applications. e.g. Is there a "Knuth's Algorithm" (like Dijkstra's)?

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jcl
Wikipedia gives a few...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_Algorithm_X>

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%E2%80%93Morris%E2%80%93Pr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%E2%80%93Morris%E2%80%93Pratt_algorithm)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth-
Bendix_completion_algorit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth-
Bendix_completion_algorithm)

There are probably others as well. KMP is well-known and, I believe, commonly
implemented for text search. Algorithm X is implemented in his "dancing links"
method, and can be used (among other things) to solve Sudoku puzzles.

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paulgb
I learned of the Fisher-Yates shuffle as the Knuth shuffle, but apparently
both names are used for it.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%E2%80%93Yates_shuffle>

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Aron
I have used an alternate shuffling approach in the past of my own naive
creation, which is to go from 1-N items, each pass selecting a random number
to swap the current position with. This would not require counting over
missing items (those copied to result) on each loop. What is the flaw in this
approach I wonder?

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paulgb
I've used that method too. The flaw is that it is biased; some permutations
will be more likely than others.

Each shuffle will consume N random numbers between 1 and N (inclusive). This
gives a total of N^N equally probable N-tuples of random numbers, all
corresponding to exactly one output permutation.

But there are only N! possible permutations, so some of the N^N N-tuples must
share the same output permutation. Since N! does not usually divide N^N
evenly, some permutations must be more probable than others.

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Aron
Ah....clever. thx.

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BrentRitterbeck
As a community that does a lot of work dealing with algorithms, I'm curious as
to how others feel about this. I think it is important to protect trade
secrets (and algorithms would certainly fall under "trade secrets" for some
products), but I also believe that hindering anything mathematical or
scientific is, for lack of a better phrase, negative.

If your company depends heavily on a huge body of code, are you in favor or
against software patents?

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maggit
Once you patent something it ceases to be a trade secret. This is an important
feature of the patent system; to ensure that what would otherwise stay as
trade secrets (eventually) become available to the public.

My company depends heavily on a huge body of code, but copyright protects us
more than enough. The ideas are cheap, the code to implement it is hard. I
think it is fair game if somebody came along and implemented the same ideas we
do. Patents stifle this kind of healthy competition.

~~~
BrentRitterbeck
Thanks for the response.

I'll now pose a different question. Do people in this community keep their
ideas out of the patent records, or do they patent? I come from a finance
background and have recently returned to school to pursue an MSFE. In the
financial world, new strategies, often implemented through algorithms, are the
lifeblood of a lot of quantitative firms. Do people think it is better to not
publish a patent if your business depends heavily an a very unique idea?

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stonemetal
If you sat down everyone in the industry who had the same amount of education
and professional experience, how many of them would have come up with a
similar system? Sure there is more than one way to skin a cat, but after years
of cat skinning school and years of professional cat skinning everybody comes
to do it in close(maybe not identical) to the same way. I would step back and
try to consider how unique the idea really is, and how easy it would be for
someone with a similar background to figure it out just by looking at inputs
and outputs.

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10ren
Testing obviousness with the benefit of hindsight isn't always fair. :-)

One test for non-obviousness is if the problem has been known for a long time,
but no one has solved it; or (even better), the standard approaches that are
taught for it lead _away_ from your solution.

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lvecsey
The interesting bit is if you read his letter with the attached question and
answer session, he talks about how trivial items that could be discovered by a
student on their own shouldn't be patented. It's a great point because it
seems there is a mutually exclusive situation here: either teachers (starting
from grade school) are inhibiting students from becoming creative with math
and making proofs, in which case they are told to just learn existing material
(that is presumably patented and in the course work) so as not to deviate from
the other children. Or they are offered the other option in a software patent
free world of ideas where they can think for themselves.

Lockhart's Lament: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130499>

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10ren
How do you get a patent, if you have developed mathematical ideas to solve a
practical problem?

I guess the answer is to patent that specific _application_ of the mathematics
- like Pagerank. This narrows the patent, so it doesn't impede progress in
general; and it doesn't harm you, since that's the only area that you're
working in anyway. From a business point of view, it would suck if someone was
absurdly successful by applying your mathematical ideas exactly in an
unrelated field... but would be kinda cool for you as a knowledge-creator. As
an inventor, you're doing both.

