ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author provides different examples to illustrate how the commitment to the "doing of things" can lead to potentially interesting work. The author's first checkers book was Millard Hopper's An Invitation to Checkers. The book contained numerous examples and exercises involving "shots", generally a sequence of forcing moves that give a player a material advantage. Playing serious checkers involves seeing organizations of moves rather than single moves built one at a time. The generation and search of a game tree is a computer-based model of a generic game: what distinguish checkers, per this representation, are the particular rules of the game. On a more elementary level, beginning chemistry students have to translate laboratory instructions into effective actions. They have a drawer of equipment; they have access to bottles of chemicals whose only distinguishing feature is often their labels. Using a procedural description, they have to find out what is being described.
