About Terminology

I'm sure everyone is familiar with the overuse of jargon in the computer industry. It's unfortunate, because it perpetuates a gulf of complexity: instead of helping others understand, it drives them away.

The problem is not limited to practitioners making up words, though: there's no shortage of just plain abuse of language from researchers and theoreticians, too. Here are some examples.

• When we adjust a bound to make it tighter, say during an algorithm to compute the shortest path between two nodes in a graph, we call this relaxation.
• When we show that one problem is equivalent to another, harder problem, we say that we have reduced the easier problem to the harder one.
• When we connect two systems in a manner which conceals the details of how this connection is accomplished, we call this connection transparent.