[dpark]

Someone else explained my problem with the title better than I managed. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2875082

Imagine the headline read, "Gas up to $8.23 a gallon" and only upon reading the article did you discover that the "gas" they're talking about is 110 octane race gas. Yes, race gas is a type of gas(oline), but the headline is still quite misleading, as the common definition, without qualifiers, is the pump variety.

As for claims of the patent, it does really cover traversing at all. It mentions it, but the meat of the patent is the data structure having two or three pointers built in for traversing and choosing between those pointers for different traversals. This is all very obvious and frivolous, but it's not claiming the basics of traversing a linked list.

(As for your side note, I found that really strange as well. I can't imagine why thy specifically called out the cases of 2 and 3 pointers. Were they planning on filing later for 4 and 5 when they figured it out?)

[xilun0]

I argue that it's claiming the traversal of linked lists, provided you have a choice between at least two linked lists containing the same set of elements. I argue that this restriction is meaningless, because it has no technical impact in this patent. Even when the patent seems to try to be a little more broad, by trying to describe the data structure itself, this description also depends on traversal and nothing else: "[claim 1 ...] said primary function pointer functioning as a primary linked list to direct a computer program to a first sequence to _traverse_ said computerized list [...]" (x2 because the same thing is written for the "auxiliary" list, then x3 in claim 2 for the "tertiary" one).

There is never any interaction described between one list and the other -- so from the point of view of patenting I don't see anything difference between this patent and a mere description of basic single linked lists, description centered on its traversal (the various enumerations are to be considered as irrelevant in themselves, and are not supplemented by anything else).

That reason alone would be one of the major angle of attack of the patent, would it not be already even more basically invalid because of triviality and prior art. The only challenge would be to present those formal concepts using casual language clearly enough so that nobody would mistake this description as the description of a new structure (even in the hypothetical alternate universe where nobody ever previously used two lists at a times for ordering the same sets of elements)

There is no meat.