Inklings: a tumblelog

Interesting this. I’d a discussion with my mother around Christmas time on the topic of machine translation (how it came up, I don’t know, except that we’d all been down in the pub earlier). I didn’t think it was really feasable, given that it would require too much context to work out exactly how to do the translation. Her idea (I’d better point out that she’s knows next to nothing about computing) was that all you needed was some big corpus that the machine could analyse to get the necessary patterns, and that it’d be trivial after that. And what do you know but that’s exactly what Google went and did.