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"It is difficult to imagine that this algorithm was not discovered before, but we are unable to find any references to it." -- I've always maintained that for a
by victorbstan 5y ago
"It is difficult to imagine that this algorithm was not discovered before, but we are unable to find any references to it." -- I've always maintained that for academics, if somebody hasn't written a paper for it, it doesn't exist. I can say I've seen this in actual code, in the wild, and I'm sure many others have.
- professoretc 5y agoIt's more like, if it you can't find it, it doesn't exist. Seeing something published is probably the most common way for academics to "find" something, but if this algorithm was present in a lot of different code bases, made its way into the Linux kernel, etc., that would have been good enough, too.