The first few lessons in this blog deal with some real basic human activities such as repeating something at a constant rate, counting at a certain rate, and reading through an ordered list of things. Basic simple human activities like that are the kind of tasks we can easily program computers to do, and they're the sort of behavioral building blocks that we need to be able to program in order to construct more complex activities for the computer to do.
The point of focusing on such simple tasks, aside from the fact that they're useful fundamentals of algorithmic composition programming, is that they illustrate one important approach to algorithmic composition: figuring out the system by which we do things--or a system that adequately emulates the way we do things--so that we can program that ability into a computer. Since a computer can only act systematically, and not by intuition, it's necessary to systematize (i.e., formalize) any ideas or deeds we want the computer to enact.
In another essay I'll discuss the relationship between systematic, intuitive, and arbitrary decision making.
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