neats vs. scruffies

artificial intelligence, jargon 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)