Akademik

n.

Programmer's term for a software bug that alters its behavior when you try to isolate it or examine it.

"No matter where I set my breakpoints, this dumb heisenbug doesn't show up."

This word is a play on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle from physics which implies that the act of measuring a particle (such as bouncing a photon of light off it) also affects the particle. Programmers also speak of "Bohr bugs" (repeatable bugs) and "mandelbugs" (chaotic, non-deterministic bugs; this one is from fractal geometry's Mandelbrot Set).