:NP-: /N-P/ pref. Extremely. Used to modify adjectives
describing a level or quality of difficulty; the connotation is
often `more so than it should be' (NP-complete problems all seem
to be very hard, but so far no one has found a good a priori
reason that they should be.) "Coding a BitBlt implementation to
perform correctly in every case is NP-annoying." This is
generalized from the computer-science terms `NP-hard' and
`NP-complete'. NP is the set of Nondeterministic-Polynomial
algorithms, those that can be completed by a nondeterministic
Turing machine in an amount of time that is a polynomial function
of the size of the input; a solution for one NP-complete problem
would solve all the others. Note, however, that the NP- prefix is,
from a complexity theorist's point of view, the wrong part of
`NP-complete' to connote extreme difficulty; it is the completeness,
not the NP-ness, that puts any problem it describes in the
`hard' category.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
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)....
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....
