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A comment on Judge Says Mathematical Algorithms Can’t Be Patented. Parent comment

Re:Judge Says Mathematical Algorithms Can’t Be Patented by hackinthebochs on Thursday March 28, 2013 @03:29PM (#5457095)
Absolutely. Although as a programmer and someone who reads mathematical papers I'm not sure how much of a benefit this would be. The hard part in understanding isn't any particular step, its comprehending how each step fits together as a whole. I don't immediately see how the translation would help this.
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Re:Judge Says Mathematical Algorithms Can’t Be Patented by tocomment on Thursday March 28, 2013 @03:33PM (#5457117)
I just feel like I think a lot better looking at code. Each input would have a descriptive variable name.

And sometimes if a formula has something unusual like a derivative, it's hard for me to see how that converts to code.

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Re:Judge Says Mathematical Algorithms Can’t Be Patented by jdminhbg on Thursday March 28, 2013 @04:30PM (#5457402)
I feel the same way. In fact, reading math feels like reading code where all the operators have been overloaded and there are only 26 available variable names.
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Re:Judge Says Mathematical Algorithms Can’t Be Patented by BHSPitMonkey on Thursday March 28, 2013 @05:31PM (#5457793)
Sounds like the math you're reading needs better Unicode support :)
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Re:Judge Says Mathematical Algorithms Can’t Be Patented by hackinthebochs on Thursday March 28, 2013 @03:37PM (#5457136)
Yeah, there's no doubt a benefit in reading a concept in a language you're more comfortable with. It would have to be an interesting algorithm that could extract meaningful variable names from the surrounding prose when translating an equation to code :)
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