Ad-Hockery

* 1&lt jargon&gt /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