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.