Go to www.patents.ibm.com and search for "Chaitin". Gregory Chaitin is
a mathematician at IBM who first discussed register allocation by
graph colouring (a problem which was studied by mathematicians long
ago) and proposed a straightforward algorithm based on this (which is
what the patent is on). His original algorithm can be easily improved;
indeed a group a Rice University (Briggs et al.) have a patent on an
improved version. (Their papers indicate that the work was supported
by the National Science Foundation. I thought work supported by US
government money didn't get patented?)
In order to see the absurdity of software patents for yourself, just
browse IBM's patent database.
Dave Wragg
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