catflap.org Online Dictionary Query

  neats vs. scruffies
       
           The label used to refer to
          one of the continuing holy wars in artificial intelligence
          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 favour 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.
       
          (1994-11-29)
       
       

  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.