[EM] Oh my God, they patented Nanson's method

[mrouse1 at mrouse.com]

I was reading Slashdot this morning, and saw the following submission:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/06/0314201

I then clicked on the first link:
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=6&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=microsoft.AS.&s2=rank.AB.&OS=AN/microsoft+AND+ABST/rank&RS=AN/microsoft+AND+ABST/rank

Here's the abstract:

A unique system and method that facilitates improving the ranking of items
is provided. The system and method involve re-ranking decreasing subsets
of high ranked items in separate stages. In particular, a basic ranking
component can rank a set of items. A subset of the top or high ranking
items can be taken and used as a new training set to train a component for
improving the ranking among these high ranked documents. This process can
be repeated on an arbitrary number of successive high ranked subsets.
Thus, high ranked items can be reordered in separate stages by focusing on
the higher ranked items to facilitate placing the most relevant items at
the top of a search results list.

Now, like all patent applications, this is full of verbose, obfuscatory
legalese, but it seems like they just patented Nanson's method, plus any
other method that sorts a group of candidates, drops a subset of those
candidates based on some criteria, and recalculate (practically any
Condorcet completion method -- take the circular tie and apply another
method to break the tie).

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it, but I thought I'd ask the rest of
the group if that's what it looks like, or if I missed something.

Thanks!

Michael Rouse
mrouse1 at mrouse.com