The gon File, 4.0.0 | Page 4

invariably malfunctioned in violent and
improbable ways.
:acolyte: /n. obs./ [TMRC] An {OSU} privileged enough to submit data
and programs to a member of the {priesthood}.
:ad-hockery: /ad-hok'*r-ee/ /n./ [Purdue] 1. Gratuitous assumptions
made inside certain programs, esp. expert systems, which lead to the
appearance of semi-intelligent behavior 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 {choke}, 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}.
:Ada:: /n./ A {{Pascal}}-descended language that has been made
mandatory for Department of Defense software projects by the
Pentagon. Hackers are nearly unanimous in observing that, technically,

it is precisely what one might expect given that kind of endorsement by
fiat; designed by committee, crockish, difficult to use, and overall a
disastrous, multi-billion-dollar boondoggle (one common description is
"The PL/I of the 1980s"). Hackers find Ada's exception-handling and
inter-process communication features particularly hilarious. Ada
Lovelace (the daughter of Lord Byron who became the world's first
programmer while cooperating with Charles Babbage on the design of
his mechanical computing engines in the mid-1800s) would almost
certainly blanch at the use to which her name has latterly been put; the
kindest thing that has been said about it is that there is probably a good
small language screaming to get out from inside its vast, {elephantine}
bulk.
:adger: /aj'r/ /vt./ [UCLA mutant of {nadger}, poss. from the middle
name of an infamous {tenured graduate student}] To make a bonehead
move with consequences that could have been foreseen with even slight
mental effort. E.g., "He started removing files and promptly adgered
the whole project". Compare {dumbass attack}.
:admin: /ad-min'/ /n./ Short for `administrator'; very commonly used in
speech or on-line to refer to the systems person in charge on a computer.
Common constructions on this include `sysadmin' and `site admin'
(emphasizing the administrator's role as a site contact for email and
news) or `newsadmin' (focusing specifically on news). Compare
{postmaster}, {sysop}, {system mangler}.
:ADVENT: /ad'vent/ /n./ The prototypical computer adventure game,
first designed by Will Crowther on the {PDP-10} in the mid-1970s as
an attempt at computer-refereed fantasy gaming, and expanded into a
puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods at Stanford in 1976. Now better
known as Adventure, but the {{TOPS-10}} operating system permitted
only six-letter filenames. See also {vadding}, {Zork}, and {Infocom}.
This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style since expected in
text adventure games, and popularized several tag lines that have
become fixtures of hacker-speak: "A huge green fierce snake bars the
way!" "I see no X here" (for some noun X). "You are in a maze of
twisty little passages, all alike." "You are in a little maze of twisty
passages, all different." The `magic words' {xyzzy} and {plugh} also
derive from this game.
Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the Mammoth

& Flint Ridge cave system; it actually *has* a `Colossal Cave' and a
`Bedquilt' as in the game, and the `Y2' that also turns up is cavers'
jargon for a map reference to a secondary entrance.
:AFAIK: // /n./ [Usenet] Abbrev. for "As Far As I Know".
:AFJ: // /n./ Written-only abbreviation for "April Fool's Joke".
Elaborate April Fool's hoaxes are a long-established tradition on Usenet
and Internet; see {kremvax} for an example. In fact, April Fool's Day is
the *only* seasonal holiday consistently marked by customary
observances on Internet and other hacker networks.
:AI: /A-I/ /n./ Abbreviation for `Artificial Intelligence', so common that
the full form is almost never written or spoken among hackers.
:AI-complete: /A-I k*m-pleet'/ /adj./ [MIT, Stanford: by analogy with
`NP-complete' (see {NP-})] Used to describe problems or subproblems
in AI, to indicate that the solution presupposes a solution to the `strong
AI problem' (that is, the synthesis of a human-level intelligence). A
problem that is AI-complete is, in other words, just too hard.
Examples of AI-complete problems are `The Vision Problem' (building
a system that can see as well as a human) and `The Natural Language
Problem' (building a system that can understand and speak a natural
language as well as a human). These may appear to be modular, but all
attempts so far (1996) to solve them have foundered on the amount of
context information and `intelligence' they seem to require. See also
{gedanken}.
:AI koans: /A-I koh'anz/ /pl.n./ A series of pastiches of Zen teaching
riddles created by Danny Hillis at the MIT AI Lab around various
major figures of the Lab's culture (several are included under {AI
Koans} in Appendix A). See also {ha ha only serious}, {mu},