Pattern Recognition — A Key Skill for Computational Thinking

Do you see two eyes and a mouth in the left picture of a tap?

Then you seem to be exhibiting a psychological phenomenon called Pareidolia where you see recognizable objects or “patterns” in otherwise random or unrelated things.

This is involuntary in the sense that you don’t go looking for a pattern but your brain recognizes it by itself.

This is not the pattern recognition we’re here to talk about.

The patterN recognitiOn which hapPens consciOusly when wE actually tRy to solve pRoblems is tHe one this aRticle is abOut.

(Does that sentence look like it’s full of typos? Examine it and tell us what you find in the comments)

Pattern recognition has been a way to solve most of life’s problems from early times. If you think about it, even the earliest human hunters would have to understand the pattern of how some animals move in groups (like deer or wolves) and use the number of paw marks or footprints to understand how many there are and make sure they don’t get ambushed.

A famous example of pattern recognition in pre-modern times is the curious case of Cholera vs Soho, London in the 1850s. At the time, germs were not yet understood and Cholera was thought to spread through the air but there was one man named Dr.John Snow who stopped the outbreak with the help of pattern recognition. He mapped out the various cases, interviewed people and narrowed down the source to a single pump which was contaminated by sewage from a nearby cesspit.

In modern times, pattern recognition is best seen in the process of Computational thinking. To understand the role Pattern Recognition plays in this process, let us first understand what computational thinking actually is

Elements of Computational Thinking. Source: simplyprimary.org

Computational thinking is the process of understanding HOW a problem is solved. It can be explained plainly as thinking in the way a computer does. It is not only used to program software but also in our daily lives. Computational thinking has 4 distinct steps:

• Decomposition: breaking down the big problem into smaller, more manageable ones.
• Pattern Recognition: finding similarities and patterns in and among the problems
• Abstraction: filtering which things you want to work on and which is irrelevant.
• Algorithms: figuring out how the problem is solved and then solving it.

Let us take the earlier example of how Dr.John saved Soho. To solve the Cholera Crisis, he first Decomposed the problem by dividing the city into zones and working on each zone individually. Then, he used Pattern Recognition to narrow down the origin of the infection to the zone with the earliest cases and then finding the areas with the highest density of the infected populace. Abstraction during interviews helped him eliminate those people who were not infected from breathing the same air and understand that the mode of infection wasn’t airborne. Finally, his calculations and diagrams which were figuratively Algorithms helped him Pin down the point of origin.

Of the four steps he followed, Pattern Recognition helped quite a lot by letting him work in a small area, thus, reducing the time taken to find the answer and also helping be more efficient with his work by providing a small area to explore thoroughly. And that is why we are here to learn more about it.

Source : https://www.vecteezy.com/free-vector/bauhaus

Pattern Recognition is the act of finding and understanding similarities in ideas and objects. It is a necessary problem-solving step as it allows us to skip having to consider every individual concept and rather use previous experience and methods to efficiently and simultaneously deal with multiple objects and come up with a re-usable solution. It helps us solve problems by looking at many similar subproblems instead of one complicated one. This means we only solve one problem using a procedure and the others can be solved with the same method.

Without relying on pattern recognition, we couldn’t solve numerous problems, like in the most recent times, if we had treated each patient of the Coronavirus as a separate case, there would never have been a way to understand that it was all the same virus. We also wouldn’t have understood the symptoms or the epidemiology of the outbreak.

Feel like pattern recognition is only used in science and complex math? We also use it in our everyday life. From the time we’re babies to adult age. Think back and try to find such instances. We have a few to start jogging your memory

• Babies learn to recognize familiar faces by understanding patterns of facial features.
• We use songs, phrases, mental pictures and other such mnemonics(memory tools) to remember things. Almost all mnemonics are pattern-based like how whenever you need to remember the color spectrum, you remember VIBGYOR or when you say BODMAS for the order of mathematical operations.
• Music is based on playing sounds in a pattern, which we dub Rhythm. All music can be decomposed into patterns of notes.
• If you look at your daily life, you can easily see that the pattern of your activities has turned into your daily routine. This can be more easily understood when you have pets and you develop a sense of the order of their activities based on your time spent together.
• Mathematical education basically teaches formulae that are applied to patterns of the same problems and are therefore applicable in a similar practical situation.

Since recognizing patterns makes life so much easier, we looked for ways to inculcate it into our problem-solving process from an early age.

• Looking for patterns in the surroundings by deriving characteristics and features and finding them in different places. The simplest examples of this could include looking at different dogs and noting the similarities as a way of understanding how different breeds have differences but all have 2 eyes, a tail and a snout or looking at different kinds of trees to understand that even though they seem different, they all have trunks and leaves.
• The most common way is Sudoku. Finding the patterns in the smaller grids and then in the bigger ones, Sudoku lets you sharpen your computational thinking skills while giving importance to pattern recognition the most.

Source : https://www.vecteezy.com/free-vector/sudoku

Here are a few sites that let you solve sudoku online. Even though the normal one is 9x9, we found 6x6 and 5x5 ones which might be easier for children.

http://6x6sudoku.com/

http://www.easysurf.cc/sudoku5.htm

https://sudoku.com/

• One of the great ways to teach pattern recognition that also has practical applications is Morse Code. It is the perfect way to detect and understand patterns and the language itself has numerous uses in encoding. Try decoding this one:

. — . .- — — . .-. -. / .-. . -.-. — — — . -. .. — .. — — -.

(Hint: use this tool- https://morsecode.world/international/translator.html)

• One forgotten but interesting way to understand how patterns affect us is Autostereograms or 3D images as we remember them. They’re not very popular now but they are built on the foundation of pattern recognition.

Autostereograms have two horizontal patterns that are printed one behind the other. When you purposefully lose focus over the image in front, your brain perceives the image in the back to have depth. This can be done in two ways:

• Bringing the image close to your nose, at which point you can’t focus on it, then slowly pulling it away while trying not to gain back the focus
• Placing an object behind the image and focusing on that while keeping the image in view.

For children who like games (so basically every kid), we found 2 online puzzles which provide pattern recognition training:

1. Shodor

The pattern generator at Shodor.org generates incomplete patterns and tasks the child to complete them from the options provided.

Source : http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/PatternGenerator/

2. Funbrain

The number cracker over at Funbrain.com uses numbers instead of symbols to blend math into pattern recognition.

Source:https://www.funbrain.com/games/number-cracker-game

The reason we talked about pattern recognition to this end and gave you these resources is to help you see the importance of pattern recognition.

It also helps develop greater spatial awareness which is the ability to accurately take in your surroundings and the objects in them. This lets them tackle real-world problems, in which the environment plays a crucial role, more effectively.

By the way, poetry is also possible only due to patterns:

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