First, this article is mostly (AI?) regurgitation. This is much better: https://smalldatum.blogspot.com/2026/01/common-prefix-skippi....

Second, I have independently invented this (quicksort on string prefixes) at my time at CWI, although I didn't end up publishing it, because...

Third, this was already published in the original 1961 Quicksort paper by Hoare: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/files/6226/H2006%20-%20Historic%20Qu.... Near the end, the section on "Multi-word keys" describes a quicksort that partitions on just the first word, and only accesses the next word for the equality partition. And funnily enough this paper credits P. Shackleton for this, thus this idea was thought of even before the Quicksort paper came out.

So as is usual for software patents, this patent never should have been awarded.