Ungrounded; impractical; not well-thought-out; untried; untested.
`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 idealize 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}.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {AI-complete}{toy problem}]