TSa (Thomas Sandlaß) wrote:
I just want to hint the Perl6 community to the fact that there exists a US patent on geometric MMD:
Well, fortunately it's really just a patent on the specific combination of a mathematical isomorphism and a well-known geometric algorithm to *optimize* method dispatch, rather than on the Manhattan metric itself. So I very much doubt there's a problem.
If MMD optimization does become an issue, there are plenty of other non-patented algorithms available. Besides which, even without a highly optimized dispatch mechanism you can get asymptotically close to the same performance by jitting an MMD look-up table on-the-fly (possibly with some table-compression where large hierarchies or many parameters are involved).
Damian
