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.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {scruffies}]