US Patent System Allows Patent for the Linked List
The US Patent system has gone from a bit broken in some place to weird. I just read this article from Slashdot about an LSI engineer getting a patent for a Linked List in April 11 2006?!?! Now this is really strange.
Congratulations are in order to Ming-Jen Wang of LSI Logic Corporation who, in patent #10260471 managed to invent the linked list. From the abstract, “A computerized list is provided with auxiliary pointers for traversing the list in different sequences. One or more auxiliary pointers enable a fast, sequential traversal of the list with a minimum of computational time. Such lists may be used in any application where lists may be reordered for various purposes.” Good-bye doubly linked list. We should also give praise to the extensive patent review performed by Cochran Freund & Young LLP.
In the filing, the main difference between this supposed invention and prior art is that …
The present invention overcomes the disadvantages and limitations of the prior art by providing a system and method for traversing a list using auxiliary pointers that indicate the next item in a sequence. The sequential list may be created in one sequence, but used in a second sequence without having to resort the list.
Talk about stating the obvious. This invention is different because it allows the adding of more than two (2) pointers on a linked list element that potentially connects to other elements where by these elements may already be in the original list. Maybe I just don’t see the invention?
