A quick quote from “The Chess Master and the Computer” in the New York Review of Books:
The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and the attention, but dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their predecessors had imagined decades earlier when they dreamed of creating a machine to defeat the world chess champion. Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition, they got one that played like a machine, systematically evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning with brute number-crunching force.”
A nice encapsulation of the way machine translation is moving forward—through raw computing firepower and improved statistical approaches, not through development of computers that can truly do the human translator’s job in human ways. (Yet? The jury’s still out here. There are many orders of magnitude more possible moves in language than there are on a chess board.)
