Pattern Finding and Human Perception

In today’s reading of Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, Hofstadter continues his discussion on patterns and pattern finding.  He mentions that in partern finding it is useful to find “islands of order”, or short steretches that seem like they make sense, or have their own internal logic. There are four types of these islands that he discussed:

-          Plateaus such as “44” and “111”

-          Up runs such as “12” and “456”

-          Down runs such as “21” and “654”

-          And lastly, palindromes, such as “5885” and “71617”

Of these islands palindromes are, naturally, the hardest to detect because they require you to span long distances in the sequence. In fact, some people may not even recognize very long palindrome when they see them such as “5824716396543219878912345693617425” and instead would look for other paterns within the palindrome such as the up-run “123.”

Because there are different types of patterns to be recognized, simply looking for one type of pattern and then another and then another would be inefficient and would, indeed, not work at all for given situations. It would only be a slightly modified version of a brute-force depth-first search, which is not how humans distinguish patterns.

Hofstadter instead employs a method of search with “parallel processing with probabilistic bias.” I think this is a very interesting idea for several reasons, the first being that as the writer goes on it become apparent that with a bit of fine tuning this can indeed work. The second is because I really feel like is much closer to how humans match patterns, they look at the entire string at the same time and try to pick out piece that are more likely to result in a pattern. Humans are already really good at pattern finding, so it makes sense to me to model a pattern finding program off of human perception.