Quoting Jeff Pritchard <jp / jeffpritchard.com>:

> My point is that simultaneous equivalent acts of genius makes
> for a good urban legend, but seems rather unlikely.

I'm not so sure.  I mean, just in the past few weeks, look at the
markaby/xx/nitro markup thing, or to a much lesser extent the
solutions to the bin packing Ruby Quiz and the recentish lazy
evaluation thread.

As far as I can see, if you've got enough people working in the same
problem space, similar solutions are almost inevitable.  I'd have to
say that the history of science and technology bears that out. 
Independent reinvention tends to be the rule rather than the
exception, and questions of "who invented X?" turn out to be
incredibly nuanced.

While there's nothing wrong with penalising deliberate plagarism,
we'd do well to rid ourselves of the modernist fantasy of frequent
wholly unique acts of genius.

-mental