"Software patents are utter garbage"

" I certainly hope that this gibberish isn't taken to be sufficient details for someone to implement."

"isn't this patent a little bit too reaching and isn't the logic a little bit too obvious to be worthy of patent?"

It's very clear from basically every single comment on this story that most of you have no clue about the patent system nor what to actually look for when sizing up a patent. I've picked just a few comments that demonstrate the general ignorance that can be seen here (this is not an insult, but people need to understand when they do not understand something and aren't qualified to comment).

I'd love for someone to reply with a citation that shows that just claim 1 is not novel, or is not inventive. To meet this criteria, the citation must either disclose ALL THE FEATURES LISTED IN THE CLAIM or it must be OBVIOUS to produce SOMETHING EXACTLY AS CLAIMED based on one or more PRIOR ART documents. It is not sufficient that all the features be in a single citation, but it must be obvious to actually come to the same invention AS CLAIMED.

So if someone could please find for me one or more citations which combined (and under Australian law it must be obvious to do so) which contains:

A method for a computer system to interpret an input from a user and generate a response, comprising:

1) receiving a user input;

2) converting the user input into an input array comprising rows and columns having a plurality of concepts;

3) determining if any of the plurality of concepts in the input array is derived from a root concept;

4) if any of the plurality of concepts is derived from a root concept, replacing each such derived concept with the corresponding root concept, identifying one or more related concepts that relate to the root concept, and generating a multi-dimensional array based on the input array that includes the one or more related concepts;

5) generating one or more additional multi-dimensional arrays, based on the input, containing any composite concepts, each derived from two or more concepts contained in the original array;

6) marking one or more concepts in the multi-dimensional arrays as essential based on application-specific criteria;

7) correlating a plurality of concepts in the multi-dimensional array to a plurality of first elements in a database by comparing a plurality of linear arrays derived from the multidimensional array to the plurality of elements in the database, wherein the first elements in the database includes a link to a second element in the database do not comprise possible responses;

8) determining a plurality of possible responses to the user input based on the correlation of the multi-dimensional array and the plurality of elements in the database

9) and generating a response to the user input.

There's 9 broad concepts here, and to my knowledge, at least 3, 4, 5 and 7 seem non-obvious to me, but my AI background is weak. Even if they are known, is it known to combine ALL those features in the way claimed? I'd be surprised if it were, the USPTO is actually quite good at searching in general.

It's so depressing to see a forum of people who are supposed to be intelligent and rational jumping to their guns at the mere mention of the word patent. Of course there are some junk patents, but those few should not be used to devalue the work done by inventors big, small or individuals around the world. If you don't even know how to read a patent, why do you feel like you're qualified to comment on their validity? We don't discredit academic papers because we've seen some of the words in their titles before, so why should patents be any different? It's dishartening to see such ignorance almost encouraged on Hacker News.