2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
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neats vs. scruffies
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2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
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n. The label used to refer to one of the continuing holy wars in AI
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research. This conflict tangles together two separate issues. One is the
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relationship between human reasoning and AI; neats tend to try to build
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systems that reason in some way identifiably similar to the way humans
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report themselves as doing, while scruffies profess not to care whether an
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algorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as long as it works. More
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importantly, neats tend to believe that logic is king, while scruffies favor
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looser, more ad-hoc methods driven by empirical knowledge. To a neat,
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scruffy methods appear promiscuous, successful only by accident, and not
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productive of insights about how intelligence actually works; to a scruffy,
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neat methods appear to be hung up on formalism and irrelevant to the
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hard-to-capture common sense of living intelligences.
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