2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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demon
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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n. 1. Often used equivalently to daemon especially in the Unix world, where
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the latter spelling and pronunciation is considered mildly archaic. 2. [MIT;
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now probably obsolete] A portion of a program that is not invoked
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explicitly, but that lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur.
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See daemon. The distinction is that demons are usually processes within a
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program, while daemons are usually programs running on an operating system.
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Demons in sense 2 are particularly common in AI programs. For example, a
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knowledge-manipulation program might implement inference rules as demons.
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Whenever a new piece of knowledge was added, various demons would activate
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(which demons depends on the particular piece of data) and would create
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additional pieces of knowledge by applying their respective inference rules
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to the original piece. These new pieces could in turn activate more demons
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as the inferences filtered down through chains of logic. Meanwhile, the main
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program could continue with whatever its primary task was.
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