One cannot (in the US) get a patent for software itself. This was settled a while ago. There needs to be more in the claims. In fact, the patent discussed here does not claim continued fractions and nobody would be in danger using them even if the patent issued as is (which is not certain, because the patent claims rather trivial modification of a classic neural network architecture, which should be brought up by the examiner as obvious).
Patents are propelling the society when they work as intended. They made XIX century and at least good chunk of XX century. Without patents, people fall back to copying each other, because it is much easier to copy than to innovate.
Patents go way back possibly as far as 500 BC, with other examples dating to 1331 etc, yet the introduction didn’t kick off any great wave of progress.
Instead a wide range of factors like better plants feeding both population growth and an ever larger percentage of society could do something other than grow food where the real root causes here. Devoting land and labor to cotton for example requires a surplus of food.
I would rather call the old iterations proto-patents. It took a while to get to a system where anyone can claim an invention as property and make it protected from "borrowing without permission" by law.
A narrower definition is fine, but now you need to define why those specific differences were important and the timeframe + geographic limitation on those specific differences must match what you’re describing.
In other words on paper patents worked like you described in some places well before things kicked off, but the rule of law was more fluid. So you could make the argument that progress depended on some specific level of integrity in the legal system, but that’s now a very arbitrary line which looks like a true Scotsman argument when you try and pin down a specific date for a transition. Similarly you run into issues of which countries what what levels of innovation etc.
Patents are propelling the society when they work as intended. They made XIX century and at least good chunk of XX century. Without patents, people fall back to copying each other, because it is much easier to copy than to innovate.