资料来源 : pyDict

恶棍,恶魔,妖怪,精力过人的人

资料来源 : Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)

Demon \De"mon\, n. [F. d['e]mon, L. daemon a spirit, an evil
   spirit, fr. Gr. ? a divinity; of uncertain origin.]
   1. (Gr. Antiq.) A spirit, or immaterial being, holding a
      middle place between men and deities in pagan mythology.

            The demon kind is of an intermediate nature between
            the divine and the human.             --Sydenham.

   2. One's genius; a tutelary spirit or internal voice; as, the
      demon of Socrates. [Often written {d[ae]mon}.]

   3. An evil spirit; a devil.

            That same demon that hath gulled thee thus. --Shak.

资料来源 : WordNet®

demon
     n 1: one of the evil spirits of traditional Jewish and Christian
          belief [syn: {devil}, {fiend}, {daemon}, {daimon}]
     2: a cruel wicked and inhuman person [syn: {monster}, {fiend},
        {devil}, {ogre}]
     3: someone extremely diligent or skillful; "he worked like a
        demon to finish the job on time"; "she's a demon at math"

资料来源 : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

demon
     
        1.  (Often used equivalently to {daemon},
        especially in the {Unix} world, where the latter spelling and
        pronunciation is considered mildly archaic).  A program or
        part of a program which is not invoked explicitly, but that
        lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur.
     
        At {MIT} they use "demon" for part of a program and "daemon"
        for an {operating system} process.
     
        Demons (parts of programs) 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.
        This is similar to the {triggers} used in {relational
        databases}.
     
        The use of this term may derive from "Maxwell's Demons" -
        minute beings which can reverse the normal flow of heat from a
        hot body to a cold body by only allowing fast moving molecules
        to go from the cold body to the hot one and slow molecules
        from hot to cold.  The solution to this apparent thermodynamic
        paradox is that the demons would require an external supply of
        energy to do their work and it is only in the absence of such
        a supply that heat must necessarily flow from hot to cold.
     
        Walt Bunch believes the term comes from the demons in Oliver
        Selfridge's paper "Pandemonium", MIT 1958, which was named
        after the capital of Hell in Milton's "Paradise Lost".
        Selfridge likened neural cells firing in response to input
        patterns to the chaos of millions of demons shrieking in
        Pandemonium.
     
        2.  {Demon Internet} Ltd.
     
        3. A {program generator} for {differential equation} problems.
     
        [N.W. Bennett, Australian AEC Research Establishment,
        AAEC/E142, Aug 1965].
     
        [{Jargon File}]
     
        (1998-09-04)