METHOD OF DETECTING, INTERPRETING, RECOGNIZING, IDENTIFYING AND COMPARING N-DIMENSIONAL SHAPES, PARTIAL SHAPES, EMBEDDED SHAPES AND SHAPE COLLAGES USING MULTIDIMENSIONAL ATTRACTOR TOKENS

A method of detecting, interpreting, recognizing, identifying and comparing N-dimensional shapes, partial shapes, embedded shapes and shape collages is disclosed. One embodiment of the invention allows for the characterization of shapes as sequences of unit vector descriptions, attributes of unit vector descriptions, shape segments, and shape segment collages whereby the detection, interpretation, recognition, identification, comparison and analysis of one- to n-dimensional shapes in one- to n-dimensional spaces can be accomplished using multidimensional attractor tokens. These attractor processes map the sequence from its original sequence representation space (OSRS) into a hierarchical multidimensional attractor space (HMAS). The HMAS can be configured to represent equivalent symbol distributions within two symbol sequences or perform exact symbol sequence matching. The mapping process results in each sequence being drawn to an attractor in the HMAS. Each attractor within the HMAS forms a unique token for a group of sequences with no overlap between the sequence groups represented by different attractors. The size of the sequence groups represented by a given attractor can be reduced from approximately half of all possible sequences to a much smaller subset of possible sequences. The mapping process is repeated for a given sequence so that tokens are created for the whole sequence and a series of subsequences created by repeatedly removing a symbol from the one end of sequence and then repeating the process from the other end. The resulting string of tokens represents the exact identity of the whole sequence and all its subsequences ordered from each end.