Follow-up to: Heuristic is not a bad word

When I was in high school, I wanted to compose music. I wanted to write the music that I wanted to hear. There was only one problem: I have good aural imagination, but I don't have world-class aural imagination. I can look at sheet music and hear it in my head. I can hear chords. I can hear two-part harmony. Yet my aural imagination wasn't developed enough to generate novel music, except when I was in certain moods or about to fall asleep. And most of what I could hear in my head I found impossible to transcribe.

Nevertheless, I wanted to write cool music. I know what I like when I hear it. I had the ability to critique music; the only problem was creating it. So I developed my own technique for writing music: I composed using brute force. Before I describe how this worked, and how successful it was, I would like to talk more generally about brute force as a method for problem-solving.

I'm sure many of you have already seen this performance. Tim Minchin's beat poem "Storm" is about the sceptical, secular understanding of the world, stupidity of quackery and supernatural, weight of dishonesty, and joy in the merely real. Contains strong language.