[PeerToPatent Australia] Invitation

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2010-01-04 00:44:06 +0100, Richard B. Kreckel wrote:
> Gosh, almost exactly ten years ago I had working C++ code that
> *exactly* implemented this patent and the ring operations on numbers
> stored thusly! I've not followed this further because I became
> convinced that striving for an internal representation of numbers
> that closely resembles decimal representation is not at all worth
> it: conversion is best done during I/O and it's only O(M(N)*log(N))
> anyways, so what the heck.

Yes. BTW, base 10^k has been used by Maple for many years (since the
beginning?), and IMHO, that's one of the reasons why it is so slow.

> The only sad thing is that, apparently, brain farts have become
> patentable. And this really sucks: The authors of the patent even
> cheekily mention the Chen-Ho and densely packed decimal (of IEEE
> 754-2008 fame) encodings and the stupid examiner at the patent
> office apparently failed to realize that their "invention" is
> nothing more than a straightforward generalization from 10 binary
> digits to 8, 16, 32, 64, or whatever the machine's word size,
> wrapped into overblown "patentese" that makes even simple maths
> sound complex. (I wonder if the examiner ever read the references.)

I've read that (some?) patent offices no longer check inventions
and wait for trials to invalidate the patents.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.net> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arénaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)