  An occurrence of a classical pattern p in a permutation \pi is a subsequence
of \pi whose letters are in the same relative order (of size) as those in p. In
an occurrence of a generalized pattern, some letters of that subsequence may be
required to be adjacent in the permutation. Subsets of permutations
characterized by the avoidance--or the prescribed number of occurrences--of
generalized patterns exhibit connections to an enormous variety of other
combinatorial structures, some of them apparently deep. We give a short
overview of the state of the art for generalized patterns.
