So far, we've learned how to interact with the world around us using basic I.O. We can read in-sensor data with digital and analog inputs, and then control things with digital and PWM outputs. But where our projects can truly become powerful is what we do in that gap between those two things, between sensing and doing. That's where thinking lies. And that's what this chapter largely focuses on.

We're going to be adding some analysis and decision-making into that gap there to give our projects some sort of intelligence. This intelligence we're adding comes from a few fundamental building blocks, some of which we've already encountered, namely the if-else structure and the while structure. And there's only two more things we'll really be covering under this, and that is operators and for-loops.

This might not seem like a lot of things, considering we're adding intelligence to our Pico, but all of these act as basic building blocks, and just like Lego, if you put enough of them together, you can make some really complicated things. Even the most complex and advanced high-end robots that seem to be able to walk around and interact with the world on their own, the control systems and algorithms that drive these robots are built with the simple building blocks that we're going to learn. It's kind of like how atoms make up all matter and everything around you that you can see.

On the tail end of this, we're going to learn about functions, which are not exactly part of logic and decision-making, but they kind of belong in this type of chapter. And as we will see, they're going to make life much easier for us.