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,
successful only by accident, and not productive of insights about
how intelligence actually works; to a scruffy, neat methods appear
to be hung up on formalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture
`common sense' of living intelligences.
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