Letter Spirit

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