neats vs. scruffies


neats vs. scruffies

(artificial intelligence, jargon)The label used to refer toone of the continuing holy wars in artificial intelligenceresearch. 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 wayidentifiably similar to the way humans report themselves asdoing, while "scruffies" profess not to care whether analgorithm resembles human reasoning in the least as long asit works. More importantly, neats tend to believe thatlogic is king, while scruffies favour looser, more ad-hocmethods driven by empirical knowledge. To a neat, scruffymethods appear promiscuous, successful only by accident andnot productive of insights about how intelligence actuallyworks; to a scruffy, neat methods appear to be hung up onformalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture "common sense"of living intelligences.