wall follower

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}.