: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.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
brute force adj.
Describes a primitive programming style
one in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing
power instead of using his or her own intelligence to simplify the
problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive
methods suited to small problems directly to large ones....
