[gotaquestion]

This is the era where prior art doesn't exist. Why read a book when you can blog about discovering "something new". I could probably make a killing blogging about my "discovery" of the algorithms in the book "Hacker's Delight".

[Mr_P]

The author titled one of the sections "Midpoint circle algorithm".

There happens to be a Wikipedia page on "Midpoint circle algorithm": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midpoint_circle_algorithm

The page claims, "Bresenham's circle algorithm is derived from the midpoint circle algorithm."

The author of this blog post even made it clear, at the end of their article, that... "many explanations of midpoint algorithm use the final, optimized version. But I added several unoptimized steps."

I think there's a lot of value in a blogpost that demonstrates how someone could re-derive a widely-used algorithm from scratch.

[taneq]

This always blows my mind - for the first time in human history we live in a world where almost all prior art is relatively easily discoverable, and people don't even bother.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, after all, I've met a lot of people.

[pjc50]

The sheer weight of information can make it harder to find. Also, nobody gets paid for being the prior art.

[taneq]

Finding the prior art pays you back the time you’d have spent repeating the same mistakes, though.