nature n.
See has the X
nature.
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neat hack n.
[very common] 1. A clever technique. 2. A brilliant practical
joke, where neatness is correlated with cleverness, harmlessness,
and surprise value. Example: the Caltech Rose Bowl card display
switch (see Appendix A for
discussion). See also hack.
Node:neats vs. scruffies,
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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.