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.