phrase used to
rationalize something that's
technically wrong, usually because it's an
instructional lie.
Engineering approximations are another example of
heuristically justifiable deviations from truth.
If you really think about it, nearly everything falls into the category of
close enough to true.
Ran across the phrase in the arstechnica article about playstation2's emotion engine:
Now, those last three units in my list (LSU, ALU, and RNG) aren't normally shown in most charts as being part of VU0. I suspect this is because they aren't used in coprocessor mode. When VU0 is acting like a MIPS Coprocessor, it only uses the 4 FMACs. "Wait a minute," you're saying, "isn't VU0 always a MIPS coprocessor--you know, the 128-bit dedicated bus and stuff? You went to great lengths to make that point in the first half of the article." Yeah, I did kind of insist that VU0 is on the CPU's "team," and that they share the same goals, and that it's bound to the CPU, etc.. This is kind of misleading (although I would argue heuristically justifiable), but all will become clear in the final section. For now, just understand that VU0 mostly operates as a MIPS Coprocessor that handles any FP SIMD instructions that show up in the CPU's instruction stream.