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.

