Sorry dang, I respect your moderation a lot but I have to disagree here that my comment is a shallow dismissal that can’t teach anyone anything.
PageRank really is a very simple idea based on elementary linear algebra, a fact many people might not have known. Thus my comment could inspire a curious person to go read more about how PageRank works instead of fearing that there is a Ph.D worth of prerequisites.
Furthermore, it is a relevant comment on the US patent system.
By the way, I think PageRank is an incredibly important development in the history of technology, and took a fair bit of ingenuity to think up. I’m not dismissive of it at all. But it is also very simple, which doesn’t contradict any of the above. And I don’t think it should be patentable, just like I don’t think other simple and intuitive applications of matrix multiplication (like the chain rule from calculus, for example) should be patentable either.
PageRank really is a very simple idea based on elementary linear algebra, a fact many people might not have known. Thus my comment could inspire a curious person to go read more about how PageRank works instead of fearing that there is a Ph.D worth of prerequisites.
Furthermore, it is a relevant comment on the US patent system.
By the way, I think PageRank is an incredibly important development in the history of technology, and took a fair bit of ingenuity to think up. I’m not dismissive of it at all. But it is also very simple, which doesn’t contradict any of the above. And I don’t think it should be patentable, just like I don’t think other simple and intuitive applications of matrix multiplication (like the chain rule from calculus, for example) should be patentable either.