20 Mar graceful degradation

A characteristic of a computational system that does not break when it does not like what you tell it. In other words, a system that may put out something other than garbage when the input would be treated as garbage by more rigid or inflexible systems. In natural language processing systems, graceful degradation is a must because not all people use absolutely perfect language all the time. In fact, few people use perfect language ever.
References: AI programming
algorithms
chaos
computing
cybernetics
expert systems
formalisms
fuzzy logic
inference
modeling
system engineering