an amateurs experiments in sequence-analysis

Benjamin Aaron Degenhart / 20th April 2012 / benjamin.degenhart@gmail.com

subgroups

patterns

mapping

For a while now i've been obsessed with combinatorics in sequences. I can't claim to even have a medium level of expertise in mathematics or programming - nevertheless i want to share three results of my coding with sequences.

Take some time to understand these three algorithms and be welcome to turn away in confusion, to laugh about my approaches or to be impressed...
If interested you'll find the code (javascript) right in the html-sites. Surely there are libraries for a lot of what is coded long-windedly here. I was interested in building as 'manually' as possible though. Most parts are very processing-costly and far from being reduced to a minimum of lines. Clearly i would benefit from learning proper object-orientated programming, graph theory and sub-routines instead of like-on-paper-string-patching :)

I used simple character-sequences; thereby the number of different elements you can enter in the sequences is limited to 26 different ones (though you can try other symbols but some will cause errors because they're being used for array-splitting indicators in code-internal string-decoding). Also things like white spaces at the end of a line or after a comma will likely mess things up - to be on the safe side you might just want to compute the example that comes on load and then mimic your input accordingly.
Every page loads with a prefilled examples and contains a link for an example using phrases instead of characters (they then get mapped upon characters code-internally though; so the limit 0f 26 applies to phrases too). The indicator to switch to phrase-mode is a whitespace in the first line of the input-field. As it can be seen in the 'phrase example' links, the input-fields can be filled by writing stuff after a '?' in the URL ('-' will cause line breaks in subgroups & patterns and jumps to the next input-field in mapping), this comes in handy for sharing specific examples via direct-link.

The obvious limitation of my (or any?) sequence-analysis is that it is monochronic; one thing after another - no parallels.
I am seeking to understand my motivation to explore this. Compensating rather low actual concrete strategizing-skills with general abstraction-processing? Building predictive capacities? Confront collaborated solutions of groups with mathematical solutions to trigger reflections about the shortcomings and (possible optimization) of solution-orientated social dynamics? That just to lay the cards open, may that not distract the matter at hand.

Let me know what you think . . .