Patterns

A pattern is a sequence of information that repeats, changes or propagates according to observable or inferable rules.

Types of patterns

The patterns that are of greatest interest to we humans fall into four categories:

Sensory: The way something looks, sounds, feels, tastes or smells gives us much insight into its nature. Sensory patterns help us navigate our surroundings, spot dangerous creatures and avoid biting into stones when we are in fact looking for fruit.

Behavioral: How someone or something acts can help to reveal its intentions. We know from experience that a growling dog who is baring her teeth is at the very least shooing us away, but could be readying herself to attack.

Temporal: On their own, dark clouds floating on the horizon do not convey any meaning about the future. But because such clouds can travel, cover the sky and ultimately unleash torrents of rain, they exist within the context of a possible pattern of events that leads to rainfall.

Logical: Abstract information can also materialize, change and expand according to some internal rhythm. Because many of these patterns exist in the realm of numbers and words, this is perhaps the newest category of patterns to have caught our attention as a species.

Patterns can also be grouped by their origin:

Inherent patterns are those which exist as a result of the many natural forces that gave rise to it. The shape, color and skin of a banana are what they are due to evolutionary pressures. (It’s true that your standard banana was selectively bred by people to ultimately acquire its current set of traits, but that “shaping” of the mass-cultivated banana was still ruled by biological processes.)

Imposed patterns are those that we force into a system based on synthetic rules that we create and execute. For example, the alternating and overlapping stripes in a tartan form an imposed visual pattern.

Actions of patterns

Patterns can act in one or a combination of three ways:

A repeating pattern is a sequence of information that reappears again and again. As a physical example of this, a banana tends to have a long, slender and curved shape, and is often yellow when ripe. This collection of traits can be thought of as the banana’s pattern. It is important to note that a pattern can still exist even when individual instances of it are not identical. One banana will be slightly different from the next, but they all conform to the general pattern.

A changing pattern is a sequence of information that is modified or continued in a consistent way. Our stormcloud fits within a pattern of change over time. Changing patterns can also occur across space, such as in the case of the tiny dots in an image made with an offset printer. These dots increase and decrease in size and density based on the how dark or light a given section of the image should be.

An expanding pattern is an object, phenomenon or abstract construct that grows in size or complexity according to one or more rules. Fractals do this, for example. (And in case you are searching for a nice vegetable to accompany all of the avocados you have harvested, I would suggest Romanesco broccoli, which grows in a fractal pattern.) Also, expanding patterns can be found in sequences of numbers that grow in some internally consistent way. A simple example of this is the string “3, 5, 7, 9”, in which we can see that the number 2 is being added to each subsequent element in the sequence.

Noise and false patterns

As we noted in the case of bananas, a pattern can be “polluted” with additional information that does not conform to the rules of the pattern. Such noise can vary in intensity, and it is even possible that it reaches such a high level that the pattern can no longer be detected.

In contrast, a false pattern is a sequence of information that appears to follow a set of rules, but which actually owes its existence to randomness.