Finding The Patterns In Sequences.

Hofstadter describes various ways to find the pattern in sequences (which in this case was mathematical). In working with the squares between triangles sequence, Hofstadter suggested in not so many words that it was easier to work small and gradually get larger volumes of data, but as a consequence it could be easy to come to the wrong conclusions. I especially thought that the ‘sniffing’ technique was particularly helpful and seems to be inclined more to humans over machines. That is that the ‘sniffing’ technique is what humans tend to do when searching for patterns with in a sequence.
The one area where I found suitable for machines that may not be so suitable for humans was the area of breadth-first over depth-first searching. Bread-first searching I think is more suited to human pattern finding in sequences as opposed to depth-first searching which is certainly suited to machine pattern finding. Breadth-first searching tends, at least in my opinion to be more intuitive to the way humans looks at various things, in general, due to our conditioning from birth, such as reading horizontally across a line of text, as opposed to reading vertically down a block of text.