标签: artificial

There are various ways of looking at artificial intelligence. One I remember hearing decades ago was that a computer could be considered to be intelligent if it could work out the underlying humorous meaning and intent associated with a sentence like "Time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like bananas."   Have you ever used Google Translate to convert some text from your native language into another tongue and then bring it back again? The results can be very funny or very scary, depending on your point of view.     Just translating something like a technical article from a foreign language into English can result in complete gobbledygook. Speaking of which, I just ran across a wonderful Gobbledygook Generator that comes up with gems like:   This is no time to bite the bullet with our holistic administrative paradigm shifts.   Actually, if you really want to baffle the people you work with, check out this Corporate Gibberish Generator , which generates seemingly-meaningful rubbish featuring your company.   But we digress... The reason I'm waffling on about this here is that I just saw this translation infographic over on the Verbalink.com website. The folks at Verbal Ink specialize in translating from English to other languages, or vice versa, and their infographic shows the results of a 2015 translation competition between one of their human translators and Google Translate.   The results are very interesting -- on the one hand, they show how far we've come; on the other hand, they show how far we still have to go before we place our trust in a computer-generated translation of a mission-critical or safety-critical document.   Huge strides are currently being made with regard to artificial intelligence. How long do you think it will be before computers can perform translation equal to, or better than, human translators?