On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, Andy Turner wrote:

> > Have a faith in technology and give it another 5
> > years.  I am amazed how accurate those translation
> > programs progressed last couple of years.
>
> Well, as far as I can tell, machine translation hasn't really progressed
> that much for years now.  Machines get faster, but isn't really a brute
> force problem at this point.

Yup, it's basically the hard AI problem: To translate natural languages
requires actual *understanding*, and that means you need to create a
program that's on a similar level of intelligence and conscience as a
human. And we're still far, far away from that.

Same with chess: people have been predicting that computers will outclass
even the best human players "in five years" for over twenty years now,
and they still only win sometimes through brute force.

> For a really neat discussion on it I would suggest Hofstadter's "Le Ton Beau
> De Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language".  It's one of my favorite
> books.

Sounds very interesting; gonna get that next time I order from Amazon.


Michael "Brazil" Borgwardt --- Member of #WASHU# and Her would-be guinea-pig.
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