Pattern Discovery in the Crib of Procrustes

Abstract

The study of physics purports to concise descriptors or theories, good at predicting a virtually unlimited set of replicas of a phenomenon of a certain nature. The discovery of patterns or structure in discrete objects pursues a similar goal, but it departs from the inference of physical laws in so far as the ensuing generation of unlimited replicas may be a curse rather than a blessing. Decades after the facts, an engineer turned computer scientist and still struggling with his math speculates about the origins of a physicist’s fascination with the essence of complexity and structure; and how they can be inferred from examples. Which led to several and still largely unanswered questions, but ultimately helped shaping many a quest for a lifetime.

Research supported by fund ex 60% D.P.R. 382/80 and by PRIN fund of MIUR. Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’ Informazione, Università di Padova, Padova, Italy and College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 801 Atlantic Dr., Atlanta, GA GA 30332, USA, Work Supported in part by an IBM Faculty Partnership Award, by the Italian Ministry of University and Research under the National Projects FIRB RBNE01 KNEP, and PRIN “Combinatorial and Algorithmic Methods for Pattern Discovery in Biosequences”, and by the Research Program of the University of Padova.