Came across a fun demonstration of pattern recognition in the intro to the book How To Beat Your Dad At Chess.

First the relationship of pattern recognition vs brute computation is a function of experience

Pattern recognition is highly context dependent.

This has been studied across players of different skill levels.

"Strong chess players are not much better than regular players at recalling totally random positions"

In this example a Grandmaster identifies the winning 8-move combo in 2 seconds! It took a Pentium processor (hey the book is 22 years old) minutes to brute force find the combo. Impressive yes. But also quite explainable...

The Grandmaster was able to see 4 common patterns forming the backbone of the combination. 2 of them are described in the picture below.

Trading experience is similar. You develop extensive pattern recognition skills.

A good demonstration is this options exercise I wrote up which anybody who came up floor trading might recognize. Spotting arbitrage combinations quickly https://moontowermeta.com/mock-trading-options-with-market-makers/

That's just one example and that one, like the pentium, is dated in a world where computers fit curves thru millions of strikes on thousands of surfaces in realtime hunting for those same arbs.

There's expert pattern recognition. There's false positives and bias too.

Market activity, deals that "smell", tingling knees, and financial statement analysis. All indicators and domains where there can be expert recognition or just your mind connecting dots bc thats what it wants to do naturally. Fool itself w/ randomness as you know.

Consider the idea of experts relying on pattern recognition while young guns go thru all the computations (a prereq to developing your pattern recognition of course). It's interesting to think of this in the context of changing careers.

If you tried to transfer your skill set when you are older, you might be able to do the computations but pattern recognition is about speed. And to compete in business decision speed is critical. Seniority properly allocated is the recognition of this...

But of course also explains why a high-performing senior person is worth much less if they switch careers even if their aptitude is high (I'm middle-aged, so i think about this). It's not just that they might not have relationships in the new biz but they don't know the patterns.

It's interesting to brainstorm what kinds of roles are adjacent in the dimension of "your pattern library still applies to this".

I'm reminded of @mjmauboussin talk at Capital Camp about T theory for making proper comparisons

Anyway, just a stream of consciousness. Back to reading about "Anastasia's Mate" (btw, I am a total chess noob. I'm reading the book to get a leg up on my kid. Yea. So the title of the book is ruthlessly ironic)

Oh and tagging @ejames_c who is a gamer and my resident expert on tacit knowledge