Spidel Tech Solutions, Inc.

Patterns

A pattern is a familiar repetition. The term pattern has several meanings to a systems engineer. Each will be discussed in turn.

Pattern Recognition

Pattern recognition is something that people do effortlessly but which has taken extreme measures to teach machines. One surprising aspect of pattern recognition, is how much of it we depend on for survival. Educated people pride themselves on their ability to reason linearly while all the time ignoring the extravagant powers of patterns that all people possess.

With all your experience you may not be able to recite a line of poetry or solve a calculus problem by hand but you always know when you have seen something before, even if only with a passing glance. That ability to say "I've seen that somewhere before" is pattern recognition and is truly astonishing. In a book called "The Sciences of the Artificial" Herbert Simon describes the use of pattern recognition in professions such as medicine and chess playing. He says they both use the same intrinsic capability of all people to recognize a pattern. The doctor sees a set of symptoms that he has seen before while the chess player sees a pattern of pieces on the board that he has seen before. Both know the next move. Not from some complex analysis or forward looking logic but from the past which when they did one thing a good outcome was achieved.

It is very demythologizing to know that a chess master is not some brainiac but someone with a lot of experience at viewing a chessboard such that they know what to do next for every pattern they see. A chess master can play 100 or more games simultaneously and win against non masters because each board he looks at is familiar and he knows what the next best move is, instantly.

Systems Engineers develop a set of patterns that they recognize. They can detect disagreement over a lack of specificity in boundaries, interfaces, requirements and other system engineering artifacts.

Pattern Matching

Pattern matching is used in information systems to simulate the human capability. Compilers and list processing languages match patterns to translate from one language to another. Pattern matching programs use FSMs to track where they are in the middle of detecting a pattern. Each letter in a word becomes a state with a few transitions out that lead to other recognizable words.

Design Patterns

Design patterns deserve very little attention as their use begs the need for a more abstract interpretive interface.

Pattern Based Systems Engineering

Pattern based Systems Engineering may have been coined by Bill Schindel at ICTT. This type of pattern is a set of rules on abstract objects applied formally to more specialized products. It appears to be very valuable when a company has many product lines and wishes to leverage its business intelligence across them.

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