Work Small

After reading the next section in “Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies” by Douglas Hofstadter, I immediately took notice of Hofstadter’s realization that when working the programming contest that he had proposed to his class, he took out the ability to work small. As a student in the computer science field, I immediately thought that working small is better. As Hofstadter informs, he finds it useful to work small and gradually grow into the bigger problem at hand when trying to find the patterns within the sequences. This also has bearing within the field of computer science. It immediately brought to mind the idea of ‘Divide and Conquer’.

In the ‘Divide and Conquer’ concept, you take an initially large problem, in this case a large sequence of numbers (or a large complicated computer program) and solve the problem by dividing it into parts and taking each separate part as a smaller problem to be solved. The smaller solved problems are then combined to recreate the initial large problem.

Using this concept will help largely with my Game Design class in which I am going to design a MUD with a labyrinth. Instead of designing the labyrinth as a whole, I will break the labyrinth down into the smaller problem of rooms, stringing a series of these rooms together to actually create the labyrinth. By working a large problem into a set of smaller problems I can get solution easier.