From: Matthew Smillie Date: 2006-01-31T04:04:22+09:00 Subject: Re: About rant on Dave Thomas site, titled 'imitation...' > > Neither one of these two scenarios is hypothetical; this stuff > happens. > Yep. I've reinvented tons of things. Generally it happens like this: I'm working on a problem, and I get a seed of an idea. I flesh it out for a couple of weeks, and get to the point where I can accurately describe it and start to implement it. It's usually around then that I find out that someone published this in the last couple of years. The problem being that until I can really describe an idea, it's really hard to search for the idea elsewhere. I mean "the thing that takes a distribution of those other doo-dads and puts it through a function that I haven't quite defined yet" doesn't get many good results on Google or Citeseer, you know? Thankfully, I've been getting closer and closer in time to the people publishing my ideas, so hopefully I'll be first by the time I'm done grad school. At least I hope so, or submitting my thesis could be very, very embarrassing. matthew smillie.