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Computer Science and Economics
Voorhees NJ

I love pattern recognition

Arthur Johnston on Tuesday, 27 February 2007. Posted in Rochester & Monroe County, Student Life

No not the overhyped book by William Gibson, (although the book was enjoyable it was not as groundbreaking or as premonitious as his previous work), and not the type of machine learning which is popular in AI design, although what I am talking about it related to that. What I love is pattern recognition as a means of learning for humans. It is what we use from the day we are born to the day a bus hits us when we don't look both ways. The simplest example being yesterday there were clouds and it rained, today there were clouds and it rained, I can conclude that if tomorrow there are clouds in the sky it will probably rain. Now obviously there are problems with this line of reasoning, but that's the thing it isn't a form of reasoning, it is in fact a heuristic for figuring out what will happen next, or how things are connected.

The reason that I say I love pattern recognition is not because it is beautiful, and not because it makes sense but because it works really well for solving problems in most situations. Which at the end of the day is what we are all interested in.

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