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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.
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