neats vs. scruffies
n. The label used to refer to one of the
continuing
holy wars in AI research. This conflict tangles
together two separate issues. One is the relationship between
human reasoning and AI; `neats' tend to try to build systems
that `reason' in some way identifiably similar to the way humans
report themselves as doing, while `scruffies' profess not to
care whether an algorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as
long as it works. More importantly, `neats' tend to believe
that logic is king, while `scruffies' favor looser, more ad-hoc
methods driven by empirical knowledge. To a `neat',
`scruffy' methods appear promiscuous and successful only by
accident; to a `scruffy', `neat' methods appear to be hung up
on formalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture `common
sense' of living intelligences.
