We're having a contest at work where participants are allowed to select any color of star-shaped sticker to place beside their name when they accomplish a certain task.
One of the participants mentioned that they were "going for the same pattern" so they selected the same blue star that they've used for every single entry in their row.
Is a string of identical blue stars, or a string of the same character like "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" considered a pattern? Or is that something else?
The most common sense of "pattern" is a rule or structure that a person can perceive and use to anticipate how something will continue. The repetition of the same event or item is the most trivial kind of pattern, but it's still a pattern.