Comments by "EebstertheGreat" (@EebstertheGreat) on "How Cold War Computers Failed At Russian - MT #2 - with CompChomp" video.

  1. ALPAC's conclusion was absolutely accurate. In the 1960s, the notion of machine translation was completely hopeless. Even now, five decades later, with billions of times the computing power, machine translation is only barely adequate in most situations, and frequently still terrible. And even that is a bit of a "cheat," as Robin would say (god I hope her name is Robin; online citations are lacking). The best modern translators like Google Translate rely on suggested translations and on analysis of large, constantly updated corpuses. So a relatively few enterprising users can easily change translations for specific terms, and people have been doing this for years. Obviously we have come a very long way, but in the 40's, people were presenting the problem as if it could be solved in a decade. The disappointment of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and even today are completely justified. This is why nobody should announce a discovery before it has been confirmed.
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