blowfish, thats absolutely the type of stuff i'm interested in. I would think it would be interesting for extra confirmation as opposed to trying to use things like that outright in and of itself.
you guys ever try trade ideas? I believe thats what Brett Steenbarger uses to do stuff kind of like this, i'm not sure how deep that gets though as far as on more microstructure type stuff.
http://www.trade-ideas.com/DOSA/
i would also think this type of stuff would work better if you had a decent measure of volatility and some rough measure if the market is trending or range bound. if you had something like that you could at least make sure your in the ball park for current conditions vs past conditions.
candlesticks were really just an example i threw out. i agree with looking at 5 bars or what have you. i soppose the problem there would be how fuzzy the patterns would be and would probly be quite hard to program anything usefull in that area.