:ELIZA effect: /*-li:'z* *-fekt'/ [AI community] n. The tendency of
humans to attach associations to terms from prior experience.
For example, there is nothing magic about the symbol `+' that
makes it well-suited to indicate addition; it's just that people
associate it with addition. Using `+' or `plus' to mean addition
in a computer language is taking advantage of the ELIZA effect.
This term comes from the famous ELIZA program by Joseph Weizenbaum,
which simulated a Rogerian psychoanalyst by rephrasing many of the
patient's statements as questions and posing them to the patient.
It worked by simple pattern recognition and substitution of key
words into canned phrases. It was so convincing, however, that
there are many anecdotes about people becoming very emotionally
caught up in dealing with ELIZA. All this was due to people's
tendency to attach to words meanings which the computer never put
there. The ELIZA effect is a {Good Thing} when writing a
programming language, but it can blind you to serious shortcomings
when analyzing an Artificial Intelligence system. Compare
{ad-hockery}; see also {AI-complete}.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
econd-system effect: n. (sometimes, more euphoniously
`second-system syndrome') When one is designing the successor to
a relatively small, elegant, and successful system, there is a
tendency to become grandiose in one's success and design an
{elephantine} feature-laden monstrosity....
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)....
