wall follower: n. A person or algorithm that compensates for
lack of sophistication or native stupidity by efficiently following
some simple procedure shown to have been effective in the past.
Used of an algorithm, this is not necessarily pejorative; it recalls
`Harvey Wallbanger', the winning robot in an early AI contest
(named, of course, after the cocktail). Harvey successfully solved
mazes by keeping a `finger' on one wall and running till it came out
the other end. This was inelegant, but it was mathematically
guaranteed to work on simply-connected mazes -- and, in fact, Harvey
outperformed more sophisticated robots that tried to `learn' each
maze by building an internal representation of it. Used of humans,
the term _is_ pejorative and implies an uncreative, bureaucratic,
by-the-book mentality. See also code grinder; compare droid.
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