Minsky starts by positing an agent, BUILDER, that takes a set of children's blocks, and builds a tower from them. While this task sounds simple, it is too complicated for one agent to do by itself.
BUILDER needs help. It must call BEGIN to choose a place to start the tower, ADD to add a new block to the tower, and END to decide whether the tower is high enough.
Each of these agents will also rely on others, too! For instance, ADD must FIND a new block, and GET that block, and PUT it on the tower top. "Before we're done, we'll need more agents than would fit in any diagram."
"Why break things into such small parts? Because minds, like towers, are made that way -- except that they're composed of processes instead of blocks. ... Though all grown-up persons know how to do suchthings, no one understands how we learn to dothem! And that is what will concern us here."
(Two themes begin to emerge quite markedly in this essay. The first is the notion of decomposing complex processes into (organized) subsets of simpler processes. The second is the notion that this organization is hierarchical, and is an organization imposed on the control of the system. Both of these ideas have a long and distinguished history in cognitive science, and can be found in Miller, Galantner & Pribram's book Plans And The Structure Of Behavior, not to mention Simon's classic The Sciences Of The Artificial.)
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