After not using the SHOOT programs for nearly a month, today (in
Logo Session 24) Miriam returned to playing with that game. She started
using the Clever Hack to run up her score (keying ‘H’ followed by
‘SHOOT 0’; the former locates the turtle inside the origin-centered
target, the latter guarantees a hit). I showed her then that in the
interim I had added a new feature to SHOOT, the option (under control
of a switch) of having the target relocate as well as the turtle after
every hit.

This fact came up in our conversations after dinner. Robby was
quite pleased with the letter he had written (using the LETTER program,
Logo Session 24) to a friend in Connecticut. Miriam interjected, “You
know what Daddy did today. He made SHOOT so tricky the clever hack
doesn’t work any more.” What struck me was Miriam’s tone — she was
imparting to Robby some shocking news.

My intention is to lead Miriam to the discovery that she can get
the turtle inside the target area using forward and turn commands
(deferring execution of the SHOOT procedure until certain of a hit).
I will describe such an action as a clever tactic. My objective is to
introduce to her a set of distinctions which focus on the particularity
of a problem’s solution: the ‘hack’ (like the gambit) being the most
context dependent; the ‘tactic’ being a set of specific actions which
may be catenated to solve any member of a class of well-understood
problems; and the ‘strategy,’ a set of actions one employs where the
goal is clear but the appropriate operations and intermediate states
are not obviously limited.