I suspect it's actually more about pattern recognition and how humans compress data in our memories. People will recognized and remember the major components of

I suspect it's actually more about pattern recognition and how humans compress data in our memories. People will recognized and remember the major components of objects, and see that they're being repeated. If you've were to spend a few minutes looking around each of the ships (for example), then shown a bunch of ships from a mixture of NMS's possible designs and all other ships designed or designable in other space videogames, you're nearly instantly recognize the style and get 90+% accuracy if asked to say if it came from within NMS or without. But here's the real kicker: I don't think you'd have any luck telling if there's one that you'd already seen before or not. The distinct features merge together, and you see one ship with a bunch of possible parts - much like how the article says it's stored! Humans are great at pattern recognition and those groupings are intuitive. If you take a dozen variations on one part, a dozen variations on another part, and show only a small smattering of the possible combinations to someone, they'll be able to deduce the existence of the rest of the square, pretty much as soon as they see three combos making an L on the two axis.