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demon: n. 1. Often used equivalently to daemon —
especially in the Unix world, where the latter
spelling and pronunciation is considered mildly archaic. 2. [MIT; now probably obsolete] 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. Demons in sense 2 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.
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