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.