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neats vs. scruffies

   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.