The court found it met the requirements of the law.
The law/case law is far too loose with the requirements for novelty.
Being upheld by a court does not mean something is a good patent.
Mathematics are not supposed to be patentable at all but people manage to sneak in pure algorithms by gluing them to an arbitrary machine. The system is quite clearly broken.
You're just being snarky and not actually playing a game of semantics, right? Patent that progresses the arts vs. patent that makes money, regulation tries to make these ideas correlate as much as possible but there are flaws.
