Said of a program that does the Right Thing
in a wide variety of complicated circumstances. There is a
difference between calling a program smart and calling it
intelligent; in particular, there do not exist any intelligent
programs (yet -- see AI-complete). Compare robust
(smart programs can be brittle).
brute force adj.
Describes a primitive programming style
one in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing
power instead of using his or her own intelligence to simplify the
problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive
methods suited to small problems directly to large ones....