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.