Letter Spirit is a project started by Cognitive scientist
DouglasHofstadter. It is documented in his book
FluidConceptsAndCreativeAnalogies. Although Hofstadter
makes no mention of
PatternLanguages (interestingly, his
main research thrust is in studying pattern finding as
the 'core of intelligence.'),
I have found pattern languages emerge from his work,
especially Letter Spirit.
This project attempts to teach 'creative letter design'
to computers. One of his goals is to be able to give
a computer program a few letters out of the alphabet and
have the program complete the alphabet using the style
presented by the few letters. In order for the computer
to do this, it has to understand how the alphabet is
composed. It needs to understand concepts about how letters
are formed.
For example: The letter 'b' could be described
as a vertical post with a small cup attached to its
bottom right.
With this information, the computer would be able to look
at a letter such as 'd' and/or 'p' and figure out how to
draw a 'b' in the same style...
Hmmm.... Could it be that Hofstadter is developing a
PatternLanguage for the alphabet?
--
ToddCoram