Progress of Google's computer translation

[Phil Bunch]

I was surprised at the conclusions of this news story about the progress of Google's computerized translation services, across a number of languages.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/09/technology/20100309-translate.html

I have been using the Altavista computerized translation service and it often made a funny translation, though usable for rough translation purposes.

A BBC podcast about this development described their innovations and the basics of how they accomplished this, based in part on using a lot of computing power and some aspects of their spell checker.  For the spell checker, they tracked how people corrected their typing and used that as a basis for performing spell checking.

I have only a vague understanding of how they do their translation, but it seems to have abandoned the traditional computer science approaches.
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Google is also actively supporting the "Singularity Event" crowd, where people assert that networked computers will somewhat spontaneously have a higher general intelligence than people within not too many years.  Soon, people won't be needed, but we may have the option of being absorbed into this superintelligent "being" and thus living forever.  That's where the "Singularity" starts to become science fiction.  Yet this type of thing has a significant following, with papers being presented, etc.

"Transhumanism" seems to be one of the labels for this activity.

Google has even launched a "Singularity University" to support this activity.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/02/02/world-renowned-scientists-team-with-google-and-nasa-to-launch-singularity-university/

and

http://singularityu.org/

Perhaps Google will buy MSFS and make something out of it.  Yet for both Microsoft and probably Google, this market is probably too small to bother with...just my two cents of course.

I just wish my MS Vista PC were more stable!  It's proving to be hard to figure out if the problems I'm experiencing are hardware or software related!

[Richard McDonald Woods]

Phil,

Do you mean that eventually my PCs will be able to fly PSX all on their own?

That implies that a machine could share my enthusiasm with flying!

Cheers, Richard