ALEXANDRIA, Va., April 15 -- United States Patent no. 12,602,213, issued on April 14, was assigned to Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Redmond, Wash.).
"Scalable approximate counting" was invented by Andrew Edward Ayers (Newport, Ore.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Techniques for implementing an intentionally approximate counting scheme are disclosed. A code counter is accessed. The counter updates a count that is approximately representative of a number of times the code is called. The counter operates in a first mode where the counter updates the count by a value of 1 and where a probability by which the counter updates the count is set to a value of 1. The counter switches from operatin...