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.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {daemon}{spool}{spool file}]