The neats wanted the AI to model human thinking patterns, whereas the scruffies didn't care whether it modeled human thinking patterns or not, just as long as it came up with the same answer.

A prof of mine argues the scruffy position rather eloquently (paraphrased):

"When you build an airplane, you don't try to mimic a bird's wings, you use rigid wings and a lot of thrust, because that's what the technology we have is best at. Same thing with AI: you cater to the computer's strengths (high-speed calculation, persistent memory, etc) instead of trying to replicate the human's (creative thinking, intuition, pattern recognition, etc)."

I think the scruffy approach is best suited for actually solving real-world problems, and the neat approach is best suited for research into how people think. (Carrying the bird/plane analogy, we build rigid-wing aircraft to fly people and cargo around, and ornithopters to learn about bird flight.

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The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!
:wq