ad-hockery

ad-hockery

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

2. Special-case code to cope with some awkward input thatwould otherwise cause a program to fail, presuming normalinputs 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.