CNNMoney Article – Holy &%$! Inventions.

Interesting article at CNNMoney today, on the topic of transformative technologies – http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2012/technology/1203/gallery.wild-inventions/index.html .  Enjoy!

They Invented What? (No. 213)

U.S. Pat. No. 7,246,054: Discrete event simulation system and method.

JW Note:  Many thanks to Patrick Anderson at the Gametime IP blog for bringing this one to our attention.  Patrick opines that, although the patent uses very serious language, the crux of the claims deal with time travel in a simulation to avoid violating a causality constraint.  Enjoy!

What is claimed is:

1. A method of performing a simulation using a plurality of processing entities, each of the plurality of processing entities maintaining a respective one of a plurality of queues, each of the plurality of queues adapted to store a respective plurality of future events to be processed, each of the plurality of queues having an associated simulation time recording a time of the simulation as events are processed, the method comprising:  establishing, for each of the plurality of future events in each queue, a respective virtual look-back time defining an earliest simulation time wherein processing any event having a timestamp later in time will not violate a causality constraint for a respective one of the plurality of future events for which the virtual look-back time is established; and selecting events to be processed from the plurality of queues based, at least in part, on respective virtual look-back times.