ad-hockery

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ad-hockery

/ad-hok'*r-ee/ (Purdue) 1. Gratuitous assumptions made inside certain programs, especially expert systems, which lead to the appearance of semi-intelligent behaviour but are in fact entirely arbitrary. For example, fuzzy-matching of input tokens that might be typing errors against a symbol table can make it look as though a program knows how to spell.

2. Special-case code to cope with some awkward input that would otherwise cause a program to fail, presuming normal inputs are dealt with in some cleaner and more regular way. Also called "ad-hackery", "ad-hocity" (/ad-hos'*-tee/), "ad-crockery".

See also ELIZA effect.

[Jargon File]

(1995-01-05)