International Business Machines Corporation

Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Other

University of California

Qinghua Zou

Guogen Zhang

James Zu-Chia Teng

Yao-Ching Stephen Chen

Gaurav Sareen

Ronald Morton Smith, Sr

Michael F Cowlishaw

Girish Kumar

Christopher John Crone

Wesley W Chu

Yinzhe Yu

Irene Ching-Hua Liu

Fung Lee

Demai Ni

Zhenyu Liu

Pei Pei

Wee Wah Alfian Tan

A game set for education and amusement includes a plurality of large cylindrical game pieces of nine different colors and a plurality of small game pieces of nine different colors preferably corresponding to the nine colors of the large game pieces. Pieces of a given color are also provided with a corresponding number selected from one through nine on one side. All pieces of a given color share the same numerical indicia. Large game pieces also include either a white or a black mark on a second side. A game board includes eighty-one depressions formed therein having a cylindrical shape corresponding to that of the eighty-one large pieces. A customized tray allows for holding all game pieces. An instruction manual containing written instructions for playing Sudoku, Checkers and Go using the large and small pieces and the game board is also provided.

Single, color-coded game set for playing multiple games

A search engine system is described herein that provides an alternative data path for collecting results provided by index servers. The alternative data path collects the results in a direct and asynchronous manner; this is in contrast to a synchronous path used to deliver search results to end users via one or more aggregator modules. An analysis system can use the alternative data path to collect a large amount of richly descriptive information regarding the performance of the search engine system, circumventing bottlenecks and other constraints that would otherwise be imposed by the synchronous data path. The analysis system can analyze the information collected from the index servers to improve the performance of the search engine system.

Extraction of rich search information from index servers via an alternative asynchronous data path

A new sub-document versioning method for record storages of XML documents which uses virtual cutting points to ensure that a search tree is able to support multiple versions of sub-documents and provide efficient mechanisms for XML updating. Record boundaries and virtual cut points divide the two-dimensional space, the horizontal axis representing node identifiers in document order and vertical axis representing version numbers, into rectangles. The bottom corner of the rectangle is used to represent the rectangles and the corresponding information of the corner is added to the search tree index.

XML sub-document versioning method in XML databases using record storages

A method for conversion between a decimal floating-point number and an order-preserving format has been disclosed. The method encodes numbers in the decimal floating-point format into a format which preserves value ordering. This encoding allows for fast and direct string comparison of two values. Such an encoding provides normalized representations for decimal floating-point numbers and supports type-insensitive comparisons. Type-insensitive comparisons are often used in database management systems, where the data type is not specified for values to compare. In addition, the original decimal floating-point format can be recovered from the order-preserving format.

Order-preserving encoding formats of floating-point decimal numbers for efficient value comparison

The claimed subject matter relates to a computer-implemented architecture that can, at a high level, store query results in a location-independent manner in order to facilitate caching of local results. To store query results in a location-independent manner such that cached results to location-based queries can be useful, the architecture can further include a mechanism for encoding a surface or area (e.g., the earth) based upon document density rather than geography. The encoding mechanism can also organize an inverted index so that no join operation is required to return valid results to a location-based query. The architecture can also include a mechanism for determining when previously cached results are adequate to satisfy a query.

Indexing and caching strategy for local queries

A system and method for automatically extracting relevant key concepts from a free-text document and indexing the document using the extracted key concepts. The indexing mechanism applies syntactic and semantic filters to filter out irrelevant terms. The remaining terms are deemed to be key concepts for the free-text document. An input search query is compared against the key concepts extracted for the free-text document for determining whether the document satisfies the query. Prior to applying the search query, additional scenario-specific terms are added to the search query in order to improve retrieval performance. The query expansion mechanism generates a list of candidate expansion concepts, filters the list of candidate expansion concepts based on a user-entered scenario concept, and expands the input query based on the candidate expansion concepts remaining after the filtering process.

System and method for retrieving scenario-specific documents

A method generates hierarchical path index keys for single and multiple indexes with one scan of a document. Each data node of the document is scanned and matches to query nodes are identified. A data node matches a query node if the three conditions hold: if it is not the root step, there is a match for the query node in the previous step of the query; the data node matches the query node of the current step; and the edges of the data and query nodes match. A sub-tree of a data node can be skipped if the data node is not matched and its level is less than the fixed levels of the query. The matched data node is then placed in the match stacks corresponding to the match query nodes. The method uses transitivity properties among matching units to reduce the number of states that need to be tracked and to improve the evaluation of path expressions significantly.

Streaming XPath algorithm for XPath value index key generation

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Issaquah, WA, United States of America

Qinghua Zou