Recognizing Patterns With A.I.

After Hofstadter talks about to process he used to uncover the squares and triangles pattern, he talks about how he turned his own research project into a class competition. The project was to write a computer program to recognize mathematical integer patterns. This is a very interesting project to think about how complicated some of the algorithms could get. Looking at artificial intelligence as using a program to simulate the human mind, it seems nearly impossible to write a program that will work like a mind of a mathematician in this process, instead of simply a robotic process of trial and error.
Just like any artificial intelligence project, the idea is to write a program that works on a task as close as possible to the way the human mind would. The different approaches that Hofstadter talks about taking would make this seemingly a nearly impossible task. There are simply too many ways the human mind would attempt to tackle one of these patterns to write a program that would work similarly to the human mind. Even in the few examples that Hofstadter brings up, he uses different approaches such as depth-first, breadth-first, or take every n-th element, when n can be any number out of infinite possibilities. He even states how he looks into these patterns as a combination of all these "searches". With that said, I do not see how any type of program to uncover these patterns could be looked at as an artificial intelligence program, rather than a robotic process to uncover a pattern.