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sizing the administrator's role as a site contact for email and news) or newsadmin (focusing specifically on news). Compare postmaster, sysop, system mangler. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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AFAIK // n. [Usenet] Abbrev. for "As Far As I Know". |
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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. |
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AI /A-I/ n. Abbreviation for 'Artificial Intelligence', so common that the full form is almost never written or spoken among hackers. |
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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. |
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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 |
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