People Keep Inventing Prolly Trees

Summary

Multiple Discovery refers to when a scientific discovery is made independently by multiple individuals around the same time. The most well-known examples are Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz's independent invention of calculus, and Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace's independent formulation of the theory of evolution. (Source: https://xkcd.com/626/) There's even a hypothesis that multiple discovery is the norm, rather than an exception: that invention is an result of social conditions rather than any single "great thinker", and that once the conditions for a discovery are met, that discovery is often made multiple times in rapid succession. It's not always immediately obvious when multiple discovery happens. There's several reasons why a case of multiple discovery might go unnoticed: New inventions may bring new terminology or be used in different fields for different purposes. It may require an intimate understanding of the field to even realize that these separate inventions are actually the same thing. Sometimes an invention is not widely known because its creator doesn't realize they've created something novel: the design seemed obvious and intuitive to them. But if we see multiple discovery happening, it's a strong indication that the thing being discovered is in enough demand that it's going to keep being discovered, at least until knowledge of it eventually becomes commonplace. And it won't stop being discovered even then: calculus was still being discovered in 1994. This is all relevant because of how it relates to one of our favorite data structures: prolly trees. We talk about prolly trees a lot, because they're the novel tool that makes Dolt possible. We didn't invent them, we have Noms to thank for that. But we did see the value in using them to build the world's first version controlled relational database. Except it turns out that Noms isn't the only group to invent prolly trees. Just like calculus, prolly trees have been independently invente...