Connecting the dots

I've been thinking a lot lately about connecting the dots, and how much connecting dots has to do with pattern recognition, and how pattern recognition helps us get through life.

We use pattern recognition everyday, especially when we read. I realized how prevalent this was when my kids received a Scrabble game from their grandparents – finding new words from the 7 letters you pick from the bag requires a certain level of pattern recognition.

Helping my son with math homework is pattern recognition: teaching him that solving the problem is a matter of recognizing the type of problem, then applying the formula.

Discussing the design of a new typographic logo with a client, requires an argument for pattern recognition – a "p" doesn't necessarily have to look like a "p," because we read the pattern of letters that create the words we read – we don't read individual characters in a word.

Even spam filtering is based on pattern recognition, just like the search and replace function in your word processing software

Not that this is ground-breaking thinking, but it's intriguing.