Yes, actually the article mentions that the fraction ply method has been used before and gives some examples of previous articles on the topic , but instead of using
chess theory or heuristic arguments to calculate the size of the ply, it uses the entropy rate of pieces and entropy based measures of ...

a more general theory is developed in the article :

An Information Theoretic Analysis of Decision in Computer Chess (also written by alexandru godescu)

http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.2144v1

the abstract is:

The basis of the method proposed in this article is the idea that information is one of the ...

The impact may not only be on practical chess program but on the scientific foundation of the field.

The direction of some sciences is for more quantitative papers than the practical papers suggesting useful search methods.
Therefore in order to make computer chess a mainstream direction in ...