My unpacking, which may be different than intended:
The “you can recurse on it” part is the important one. “Finite” just means it’s possible to fill a hard drive with the solution.
But if you don’t know the solution, what are the good ways to get that hard drive? What skills are key? This is recursion level one.
What’s a good way to acquire the skills that seem necessary (as outlined in level one) to solve the problem? How can you test ideas about what’s useful? That’s recursion level two.
And so on, with stuff like “how can we increase community involvement in level 2 problems?” which is a level 4 question (community involvement is a level 3 solution to the level 2 problems). Eventually you get to “How do I generate good ideas? How can I tell which ideas are good ones?” which is at that point unhelpful because it’s the sort of thing you’d really like to already know so you can put it on a hard drive :D
To solve problems by recursing on them, you start at level 0, which is “what is the solution?” If you know the answer, you are done. If you don’t know the answer, you go up a level—“what is a good way to get the solution?” If you know the answer, you go down a level and use it. If you don’t know the answer, you go up a level.
So what happens is that you go up levels until you hit something you know how to do, and then you do it, and you start going back down.
My unpacking, which may be different than intended:
The “you can recurse on it” part is the important one. “Finite” just means it’s possible to fill a hard drive with the solution.
But if you don’t know the solution, what are the good ways to get that hard drive? What skills are key? This is recursion level one.
What’s a good way to acquire the skills that seem necessary (as outlined in level one) to solve the problem? How can you test ideas about what’s useful? That’s recursion level two.
And so on, with stuff like “how can we increase community involvement in level 2 problems?” which is a level 4 question (community involvement is a level 3 solution to the level 2 problems). Eventually you get to “How do I generate good ideas? How can I tell which ideas are good ones?” which is at that point unhelpful because it’s the sort of thing you’d really like to already know so you can put it on a hard drive :D
To solve problems by recursing on them, you start at level 0, which is “what is the solution?” If you know the answer, you are done. If you don’t know the answer, you go up a level—“what is a good way to get the solution?” If you know the answer, you go down a level and use it. If you don’t know the answer, you go up a level.
So what happens is that you go up levels until you hit something you know how to do, and then you do it, and you start going back down.