According to AI researcher Pedro Domingo's The Master Algorithm book, in the AI field you have to first approximation these camps:
- Symbolists like symbol manipulation and logic: decision trees, random decision forests, production rule systems, inductive logic programming,...
- Connectionists like to mimic the brain's interconnected neurons (neuroscience): artificial neural networks, deep learning, spiking neural networks, liquid neural networks, neuromorphic computing, hodgkin-huxley model,... (this is booming the most in the current wave of AI boom right now)
- Bayesians like uncertainity reduction based on probability theory (staticians): bayes classifier, probabilistic graphical models, hidden markov chains, active inference,... Frequentists exist too, defining probability as a limit of number of experiments instead of a subjective prior probability that is being updated with new data.
- Evolutionaries like evolution (biologists): genetic algorithms, evolutionary programming
- Analogizers like identifying similarities between situations or things (psychologists): k-nearest neighbors, support vector machines,...
Then there are various hybrids: neurosymbolic architectures (AlphaZero for chess, general program synthesis with DreamCoder), neuroevolution, etc.
And technically you can also have:
- Reinforcement Learners like learning from reinforcement signals: reinforcement learning (most game AIs use it like AlphaZero for chess uses it, LLMs like ChatGPT start to use it more, robotics,...)
- Causal Inferencers like to build a causal model and can thereby make inferences using causality rather than just correlation: causal AI
- Compressionists who see cognition as a form of compression: autoencoders, huffman encoding, Hutter prize
- Divergent Novelty Searchers love divergent search for novelty without objectives, without converging: novelty search
- Selforganizers: Selforganizing AI like neural celluar automata
And you can hybridize these too with deep reinforcement learning, novelty search with other objectives etc.
I love them all and want to merge them. I think one perspective often isnt enough. They're being constantly merged in so many ways in various new AI research papers, it's cool.