Re: Patent fun

[Mordy Ovits <movits () bloomberg com>]

On Friday 02 July 2004 11:53 am, Scharf, Stephen wrote:
> Surprising then that the linguists did not own all the inventions. Seems
> to me that a profitable enterprise would be to try and re-create
> scientific proofs matched to the first letters of x number of words. One
> could mail out a letter with 1000 random letters and then create their
> own prior art for anything if they were creative enough.

The entire proof is based on the difficulty of back-fitting the idea to the 
set of letters.  That's what the "one-way" property is derived from.  It's 
not as hard as cracking SHA1, but it's more than practically difficult for a 
large scientific paper.  It's sort of an old fashion way to do a bit 
commitment protocol.

Also, I don't think it was used extensively.  It was more of a curiosity.



Mordy
-- 
Mordy Ovits
Network Security
Bloomberg L.P.

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