Source : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

neats vs. scruffies
     
         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)