Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina) / quote 11 of 68
The early failure of machine translation
In 1963, after spending $20 million on research into machine translation, the US funding agency concluded: “There is no immediate or predictable prospect of useful machine translation” – National Academy of Sciences National Research Council, 1963. Faced with a hard problem, AI research will often begin by simplifying it. Two kinds of simplification are frequently made.