* The provisional patent application for the Slug algorithm was filed on March 27, 2017, and this is incorporated into the final patent at the beginning of the Description section. A provisional patent establishes a priority date for everything it discloses (which was the whole algorithm), and it gives the inventor one year to complete the application process.

* The JCGT paper was published a few months later on June 14, 2017, after the priority date.

* The final patent application was submitted on February 1, 2018, before the one-year deadline.

* The patent was granted about 1.5 years later by the USPTO on August 6, 2019.

The details are in Eric's post here:

https://terathon.com/blog/decade-slug.html

The timeline basically checks out, maybe it simply took the patent office over a year to process the patent application?

He filed in 2018-02-01, after publishing in 2017. What do you think breaks in the patent system with such an approach? https://terathon.com/blog/decade-slug.html