regex
Pattern recognition is a sticking point in computers. Human brains are designed to recognize patterns. If there is no pattern, your brain will make one up. See "The Perfect Mind". Programmers have been trying to come up with ways to find patterns in the chaos since computers were invented. One of these methods is called Regular Expressions or regex. I use it daily in my new job. I am no expert. Nothing brings a group of programmers together like trying to match some collection of garbage data via regex. I've had half the company sit down and scratch their heads over these little blobs of seemingly random characters. I would give a couple of examples, but they would not make any sense. It ten or twenty constructions of regex statements to catch what is really going on. Even then it takes several more before you can look at a regex statement and guess what it is looking for. It takes even more to diagnose why a regex statement is not working. The hard ones are the ones with "or" and "and" logic.
I look at ht the characters on the page of paper and it takes my brain a second to recognize them as letters. The patterns continue to words and then sentences. Then we get paragraphs and stories. Then we get to chapters and books. Then we get to whole library sections. The patters repeat, but they all say different tings in different ways. The patters are simple There are 62 primary characters with a bunch of punctuation added in in the English language. They make up the blocks that make up the libraries of information written in English. I'm sure there is a matching amount in the European languages. Then there are all the Oriental variants. They are different patterns that end up telling the same story. I have the regex in my head for English. I'm listening to Spanish lessons at work occasionally, but this won't help me develop the Spanish language pattern any time soon. I have to live it for a while.
Computers have come a long way, but they too have to live the experience before they will learn the patterns. I hope this does not happen in my lifetime. I envision either a Matrix or Terminator scenario. It all boils down to pattern recognition. That is what separates Humans from the animal kingdom, not the thumb. We recognize our thumb and describe it in a way someone else can discern the pattern and identify their thumb. It is still a thumb in Chinese or Latin. Even though these languages use different words to describe what a thumb is, they describe it in an amazingly similar way. That is because, even though we use different words to describe our thumbs, we still have the same pattern recognition software running in our brains.
Scientists say that there is a huge chunk of our genetic code that does nothing. I say bullshit. That is the code for everything that they have not discovered like this pattern recognition software running in all our heads.