From the Chronicles of Scruffy Versus Neat: the Lighthill Affair

The 1973 Lighthill Affair was an Affair in the sense of the Dreyfus and Profumo Affairs. And although it was scaled down to teacup size, it was big enough to make it into a textbook published twenty years later:

… the Lighthill Report, which formed the basis for the decision by the British government to end support of AI research in all but two universities. (Oral tradition paints a somewhat different and more colorful picture, with political ambitions and personal animosities that cannot be put into print.) [1]

In this article I will put in print some of the things hinted at here, and elaborate on the issues that have remained topical.