Yep! But that’s sort of my point, and maybe this is just some misplaced academic shit of mine but if you’re going to write a paper then “easily had this idea and never discovered the paper” just doesn’t fly.
Almost all academic work is derivative tweaks of yesterday’s work, yet we still fall over ourselves to cite this stuff.
I mean going from standard regex to NFA to DFA is already more sophisticated than that one, it's _quite_ oldschool and gives you linear time matching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson%27s_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_construction
And what I mean to say by this as they could have easily have had this idea and never had discovered the whitepaper you referenced.