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In countless conversations about AI in the life sciences, a recurring theme emerges: the pressing need for vast, clean, "AI-ready" data. People often envision AI as massive prediction engines like AlphaFold or other drug discovery tools that rely on enormous databases of protein sequences and omics data. While these are undeniably important applications, it's unfortunate that other, less glamorous (yet equally critical) uses receive less attention in pharmaceutical sciences. One such area is synonym management and ontology harmonisation, where AI's semantic awareness holds immense potential. To explain why—and to illustrate the frustration of dealing with systems that don't understand semantics (and since it's Halloween)—let me share a story about a Halloween-themed 8-bit text parser adventure game from the '90s called *Hugo's House of Horrors*. If you're too young (or possibly too cool) to remember, this game casts you as Hugo, whose girlfriend Penelope has been kidnapped following an ill-advised babysitting job at an obviously haunted house. Your mission is to explore the house and rescue her by directing Hugo with arrow keys and simple commands like "open door" or "inspect mask." Along the way, you're met with various spooky puzzles and nefarious monsters that frustrate your efforts. More often than not, however, the most difficult task was overcoming the game's restrictive parser engine. <figure> <img src="/blog/hugo1.png" alt="computer says no"/> <figcaption>Computer says "no"</figcaption> </figure> Your first puzzle is to unlock the front door using a key hidden somewhere. Anyone who has ever played any video game ever can probably tell right away that the key is hidden in that bright yellow pumpkin out ...