1. Said of a problem that, although
nontrivial, can be solved simply by throwing sufficient
resources at it. 2. Also said of problems for which a solution
would neither advance the state of the art nor be fun to design and
code.
Hackers regard uninteresting problems as intolerable wastes of
time, to be solved (if at all) by lesser mortals. Real
hackers (see toolsmith) generalize uninteresting problems
enough to make them interesting and solve them -- thus solving the
original problem as a special case (and, it must be admitted,
occasionally turning a molehill into a mountain, or a mountain into
a tectonic plate). See WOMBAT, SMOP; compare
ivial: adj. 1. Too simple to bother detailing. 2. Not worth the
speaker's time. 3. Complex, but solvable by methods so well known
that anyone not utterly {cretinous} would have thought of them
already....
ivial adj.
1. Too simple to bother detailing. 2. Not
worth the speaker's time. 3. Complex, but solvable by methods so
well known that anyone not utterly cretinous would have
thought of them already....
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)....