Forgive me, but I've never heard of the term..
A Rube Goldberg machine is a deliberately overengineered apparatus that performs a very simple task in a very complex fashion, usually using a chain reaction. Goldberg's drawings, for example, almost always included a live animal which was expected to perform part of the sequence of tasks. The term first appeared in Webster's Third New International Dictionary with the definition, "accomplishing by extremely complex roundabout means what actually or seemingly could be done simply." The expression has been dated as originating in the United States around 1930[1] to describe Rube Goldberg's illustrations of "absurdly-connected machines".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine
The board game mouse trap instantly comes to mind... here's a video that defines a Rube Goldberg machine..
Why am I thinking about this? Well, I've never heard of the term, and it was used in the Perimeter article in the current issue of the Walrus, and discussed here here.
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