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)
Nearby terms:
NDS « ne « neat hack « neats vs. scruffies » Nebula »
NEC » NEC 780-C
