Pattern Recognition

Working on an assignment, recalling some information in articles from MIT on Face Recognition, something about the uncanny nature of humans being able to memorize and recognize millions of faces. This has given me a few questions; as if we were to take various cats that look the same to us and see if the computer could find differences between them visually (not behaviourally).

Back to the topic of the uncanny ability to recognize faces; then I recall the idea of the "creative interlocutor" -- something that another teacher probably put a bit more emphasis on. More or less the importance that we put creating associations among various items.

We compare color.
We compare shape.
We compare smells.
We compare sounds.

If we see something with a wooden texture, then we don't expect a clanging sound when knocking on it; something that could happen if someone were to paint the texture on a piece of metal.

We auto-associate unrelated items based on previous experience.

For example, a few weeks ago the Jewish community was attacked by the community at large for a frivolous event. It was massive mis-associations. Like what's happening to people in the middle east. Massive mis-associations based on previous knowledge. Our minds are wonderful things, but we have to keep it in check from extrapolating what is false.

Noise might just as well be noise, and not a pattern to apply to the whole.