Second, I have independently invented this (quicksort on string prefixes) at my time at CWI, although I didn't end up publishing it, because...
Third, this was already published in the original 1961 Quicksort paper by Hoare: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/files/6226/H2006%20-%20Historic%20Qu.... Near the end, the section on "Multi-word keys" describes a quicksort that partitions on just the first word, and only accesses the next word for the equality partition. And funnily enough this paper credits P. Shackleton for this, thus this idea was thought of even before the Quicksort paper came out.
So as is usual for software patents, this patent never should have been awarded.
It's kind of insane that such an obvious optimization can be patented, I have to imagine that it has been invented independently dozens if not hundreds of times.
Nothing in this slop means anything particularly, but this detail is extra-wrong considering the variety of processors that the inventor says he used to create this algorithm.
Second, I have independently invented this (quicksort on string prefixes) at my time at CWI, although I didn't end up publishing it, because...
Third, this was already published in the original 1961 Quicksort paper by Hoare: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/files/6226/H2006%20-%20Historic%20Qu.... Near the end, the section on "Multi-word keys" describes a quicksort that partitions on just the first word, and only accesses the next word for the equality partition. And funnily enough this paper credits P. Shackleton for this, thus this idea was thought of even before the Quicksort paper came out.
So as is usual for software patents, this patent never should have been awarded.
I think this is inventors blog https://smalldatum.blogspot.com/2026/01/common-prefix-skippi...
Thanks for sharing.
For wasting my time.
The only thing someone could learn from this is that CPU registers can be 8 bytes.
With one sentence per line.
Most annoying.
What does naturally even mean here. How is a 64 byte register's (zmm0) size any less natural?