found the meaning to Gedanken's handle.anyone else have handles
thathave a meaning?
1)John Reynolds, 1970. "GEDANKEN - A Simple Typeless Language Based
on the Principle of Completeness and the Reference Concept", J.C.
Reynolds, CACM 13(5):308-319 (May 1970).
[Jargon File]
/g*-dahn'kn/ Ungrounded; impractical; not well-thought-out;
untried; untested.
2)"Gedanken" is a German word for "thought". A thought experiment
is one you carry out in your head. In physics, the term "gedanken
experiment" is used to refer to an experiment that is impractical
to carry out, but useful to consider because it can be reasoned
about theoretically. (A classic gedanken experiment of relativity
theory involves thinking about a man in an elevator accelerating
through space.) Gedanken experiments are very useful in physics,
but must be used with care. It's too easy to idealise away some
important aspect of the real world in constructing the
"apparatus".
Among hackers, accordingly, the word has a pejorative connotation.
It is typically used of a project, especially one in artificial
intelligence research, that is written up in grand detail
(typically as a Ph.D. thesis) without ever being implemented to any
great extent. Such a project is usually perpetrated by people who
aren't very good hackers or find programming distasteful or are
just in a hurry. A "gedanken thesis" is usually marked by an
obvious lack of intuition about what is programmable and what is
not, and about what does and does not constitute a clear
specification of an algorithm. See also AI-complete, DWIM.
