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more about demon
demon |
5 definitions found From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]: Demon \De"mon\, n. [F. d['e]mon, L. daemon a spirit, an evil spirit, fr Gr ? a divinity; of uncertain origin.] 1. (Gr. Antiq.) A spirit, or immaterial being holding a middle place between men and deities in pagan mythology. The demon kind is of an intermediate nature between the divine and the human. --Sydenham. 2. One's genius; a tutelary spirit or internal voice; as the demon of Socrates. [Often written {d[ae]mon}.] 3. An evil spirit; a devil. That same demon that hath gulled thee thus --Shak. From WordNet r 1.6 [wn]: demon n 1: one of the evil spirits of traditional Jewish and Christian belief [syn: {devil}, {fiend}, {daemon}, {daimon}] 2: a cruel wicked and inhuman person [syn: {monster}, {fiend}, {devil}, {ogre}] From Jargon File (4.2.3, 23 NOV 2000) [jargon]: demon n. 1. [MIT] A portion of a program that is not invoked explicitly, but that lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. See {daemon}. The distinction is that demons are usually processes within a program, while daemons are usually programs running on an operating system. 2. [outside MIT] Often used equivalently to {daemon} -- especially in the {{Unix}} world, where the latter spelling and pronunciation is considered mildly archaic. Demons in sense 1 are particularly common in AI programs. For example, a knowledge-manipulation program might implement inference rules as demons. Whenever a new piece of knowledge was added, various demons would activate (which demons depends on the particular piece of data) and would create additional pieces of knowledge by applying their respective inference rules to the original piece. These new pieces could in turn activate more demons as the inferences filtered down through chains of logic. Meanwhile, the main program could continue with whatever its primary task was From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (13 Mar 01) [foldoc]: demon 1.(Often used equivalently to {daemon}, especially in the {Unix} world, where the latter spelling and pronunciation is considered mildly archaic). A program or part of a program which is not invoked explicitly, but that lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. At {MIT} they use demon" for part of a program and daemon" for an {operating system} process. Demons (parts of programs) are particularly common in {AI} programs. For example, a {knowledge}-manipulation program might implement {inference rules} as demons. Whenever a new piece of knowledge was added, various demons would activate (which demons depends on the particular piece of data) and would create additional pieces of knowledge by applying their respective inference rules to the original piece. These new pieces could in turn activate more demons as the inferences filtered down through chains of logic. Meanwhile, the main program could continue with whatever its primary task was This is similar to the {triggers} used in {relational databases}. The use of this term may derive from "Maxwell's Demons" - minute beings which can reverse the normal flow of heat from a hot body to a cold body by only allowing fast moving molecules to go from the cold body to the hot one and slow molecules from hot to cold. The solution to this apparent thermodynamic paradox is that the demons would require an external supply of energy to do their work and it is only in the absence of such a supply that heat must necessarily flow from hot to cold. Walt Bunch believes the term comes from the demons in Oliver Selfridge's paper "Pandemonium", MIT 1958, which was named after the capital of Hell in Milton's "Paradise Lost". Selfridge likened neural cells firing in response to input patterns to the chaos of millions of demons shrieking in Pandemonium. 2. {Demon Internet} Ltd. 3. A {program generator} for {differential equation} problems. [N.W. Bennett, Australian AEC Research Establishment, AAEC/E142, Aug 1965]. [{Jargon File}] (1998-09-04) From Easton's 1897 Bible Dictionary [easton]: Demon See {DAEMON}.
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