I "invented" a mechanism for compacting GC which needs 0 bytes of scratch space to keep track of pointers to update when moving objects. Only after I "invented

I "invented" a mechanism for compacting GC which needs 0 bytes of scratch space to keep track of pointers to update when moving objects. Only after I "invented" it I could actually find a paper written in 1978 that was exactly "my" idea. I couldn't find it first because the terminology that paper used was quite different from the modern terminology. Only when I had a glimpse in the solution I was able to find the paper because I happened to use terms related to the solution space and not those related to the problem space