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Comment by vortico | Hacker News Reader

How can someone even patent something I was able to come up with at age 14? As a teenager I would have thought it was a stupid thing to patent, because it's a straightforward reaction after learning of the Collatz conjecture. The US patent office is beyond fucked.

And it's not even remotely cryptographically secure, or even fast.

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It's not that it is stupid, straight-forward, insecure, or slow.

The problem I see is that this patent claims ownership of an infinite number of transformations that can be made to the Collatz function. There is nothing novel about this. They state that it is used as a hashing function, yet provide no property of the system that qualifies it to be a hashing function.

This belongs in a research paper, not in a patent.

Imagine patenting fractals, as in functions f(z) that can be iterated to make fractals!

Pretty much all patents are written in a way that can cover an infinite number of variations of the core idea. The novelty here may actually be the use of this as a cryptographic hash function. They give no supporting property, but as my other comment asks, if such a property cannot be easily divined, it may in fact be non-obvious.

It's an application, it hasn't been granted.

I totally agree! I learned about the conjecture in my late 20s and did some extensive work on the problem. The idea of using it as a hashing function is obvious (and equally obvious, it is a terribly inefficient one).

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