[xophe]

>>"I am told that the courts are trying to make a distinction between mathematical algorithms and nonmathematical algorithms."

As Knuth implies, this is a fool's errand, and this is the reason why courts should not award any patents protecting an algorithm at all.

As a thought exercise, is "A website that advertises a series of random beers from a known collection of user preferred beers" mathematical?

No? Then, is a random shuffling algorithm mathematical based on a vector of inputs mathematical? No? How about the following code?

void sort(int *arr, int len) for (int i = 0; i < len; ++i) { r = rand % len; swap(arr + i, arr + r); }

Not mathematical? Then what about a function "s" described as s(x) = f(g(h(x))), where x is a vector, h multiplies the vector by the identity matrix, and g multiplies its input against the set of all possible matrices such that all elements are 1 or 0 and there can be at most 1 non-zero element for a given row and column, and f chooses a random input from its set and returns its multiplication against a vector of 1s?

These are, at their core, all algorithms, and they are all mathematical. The courts have already established that the "Internet of things" is not patentable, which is why the first example transfers to the second. This is admittedly a poor example, but for a better understanding read Knuth's "Fundamental Algorithms."

[throwawaykf05]

You and Knuth (and most others here) are operating under the same misunderstandings, the main one being a false equivalence between a patentable invention and the non-patentable underlying principles or elements that enable it. Let me just point to a previous comment that addresses this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7923894

Applying that to your example, note that a patent on "random ads" would not preempt anyone else from using shuffling algorithms, and hence it is not the algorithm being patented.