I don't really think of the problem as identifying predefined forest types. I'd like to identify patterns of the locations of leaf types in piles in time. I'd like to oversimply the leaves as changing shapes formed by the intersection of curves - perhaps just a few curves - the changing nature of the shapes corresponding to how leaves might decompose.

I'd like to learn how to count all possible types of leaf piles, but that wasn't the problem that I was asking.

Maybe there could be two related problems.

__________________
She 'tis not there.

 

jasonbe,

I don't know your age or background. My opinion is that if you are still a kid, your mind might eventually settle down enough to deal with specifics and make progress in mathematics, computer programming or other sciences. If you are an adult, I think you should pursue other interests (and maybe you do). Your ideas are imaginative in the poetic or literary sense, but your thoughts jump around too much to be more than vague verbal proposals. Become a science fiction writer or a game designer or a literary great like Jorges Luis Borges (see his story "The Library Of Babel" for Combinatorics).

If you can formulate an actual mathematical question, I might be able to help. As to Science Fiction writing etc. , my skills are limited.

 

O.K., let’s say that I was reading some works that were written by hand. I wanted to use math to identify differences. I had the following criteria to evaluate the works – that wasn’t very representative of them – but was still criteria that I wanted to use. The order of the first five verbs, nouns, and adjectives in sentences – for example, whether verbs tended to follow nouns or adjectives; and how curves that had a minimum length, were least straight, and made up the letters changed from letter to letter in the word – say, from left to right on the page. Science fiction writers might be interested in this as well as a people who design optical recognition software programs that have a feature that automatically corrects grammar. If I didn’t communicate this problem clearly, would you help me to define it by explaining what could be involved in an algorithm for this type of program. Of course, such a program may involve different things, but solutions to it may be applicable if I am not able to communicate some questions.

__________________
She 'tis not there.

 

When you say things like "how curves that had a minimum length, were least straight, and made up the letters changed from letter to letter in the word – say, from left to right on the page", you aren't saying anything specific enough for a mathematician or programmer to use. No, I can't help you define the problem. I'm not a mind reader. And I don't think you have a clear definition of what you want to do in your mind.

 

I'll make up a more specific example. Let's say that I am reading some books that were written by hand. In these books, three pronouns appear a lot - "item," "she," and "he". I am only interested in pages that have a combination of 10 or more of any of these words on a page, and I'm only interested in comparing the order that the first 10 of these words appear on each page for the first 10 pages of each book on which these pronouns appear in this quantity. I am also interested in representing how the part of "e" without the "-" that looks like a "c" in each of these words changes in each word. Specifically, I'm not so much interested in the way that the handwritten curve that looks like a "c" in the letter "e" in the word "item" changes when it appears next in the word "she" or "he" on the same page. Rather, I'd be interested in the way that this curve changes subsequent times that it appears in the letter "e" in the same word - in this case the word "item" – but in other cases the word “she” when I am comparing the appearances of the word “she” and the word “he” when I am comparing the appearances of that word. I want to group books according to these patterns - the order in which the these three pronouns appear starting from the beginning of each page, how the curve that looks like a "c" but is really part of the letter "e" changes in these words as described, and how these patterns change for the first 10 pages of books. I just want to identify patterns, but maybe these patterns could also be compared to categorize how people have related to words that have anthropomorphic meanings or meanings that have to do with gender in books that were written for people of different ages during different historical periods.

__________________
She 'tis not there.