We're here again in the beautiful YouTube Space New York in a studio filled with lights
and camera and now some action! This particular action is going to be talking about how computers
can help countries get along a little better. Today we're going to talk about machine translation
and how it doesn't go so well in the early days.
Ah, the 80's! Well known for great fashion sense, bad guys with cheesy Russian accents
and fears of nuclear annihilation. Maybe it's the coder in me, but I've actually always
wondered if the Cold War would've been a bit, well, you know, warmer if computers could've
helped us understand each other. It turns out we tried just that.
Welcome to CompChomp, the only show on the internets where there's something colder than
a Russian winter. Let me take you back in time to lovely 1948.
Computers were a thing. A new thing. A big, room-sized thing that you had to feed with
little tiny paper-punched holes. These binary-loving behemoths were so successful
that folks actually started wondering if there was any problem they couldn't solve. And one
of those folks that definitely couldn't ignore their power was Mr. Warren Weaver. Fear the
mighty power of the computer! He kept bugging all of his colleagues - hey,
guys! You know what computers should be doing? Guys, guys, my idea about computers and Russian!
And they were like, dude, Weaver, we have told you a million times, you need to stop
bothering us and just write this stupid Russian thing down.
He sat down and he wrote the very first memo on computer translation and it really got
the ball rolling. First, UCLA and Georgetown got on board, and then MIT followed in 1951
by giving Yehoshua Bar Hillel the position of full-time professional machine translation
man - the first in the business. Then in 1954, IBM and Georgetown staged the
first public demo of machine translation: 49 whole Russian sentences. The crowd went
wild! MT was the next big thing. So, how did they do it? Well, they started
with a Russian sentence and they broke it into its dictionary chunks, uh, you know,
word and word pieces like suffixes and roots. Then they applied one of just six rules to
the chunks. For example, here's the first rule. No no, wait, we are programmers. We
count from zero, so this is the zeroth rule. A word was associated with a code, 110, and
that code told the machine to go back and look at the last full word and when it found
that last word it had to check that word for another code, 21, and if that word came up
21s, the machine placed it after the first word. Now I know that sounds like a whole
bunch of steps, but the result was pretty simple: you take two words and you
switch 'em. With only a fistful of rules like this, the
machine translated amazing sentences like, ahem, "Magnitude of angle is determined by
the relation of arc to radius" and "The price of potatoes is determined by the dema..."
Potatoes!? Really, machine!?! Culturally sensitive much?
In spite of that, the journalists were impressed and the public, they were stunned. In a world
that had never seen computer smarts like this, this was magic.
But, uh, if you peer behind that curtain a little bit, things start to feel a tiny bit
less magical. The sentences had all been carefully selected. Everything was transliterated from
Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet. And, grammatically, sentences included only third-person verbs
and avoided any negations or questions. Sometimes things that we would think of as grammar or
syntax were stored as part of the dictionary entries. And that last one is actually pretty
cheap - think about it. This machine associates each Russian word with up to two dictionary
entries. So there's a word that translates to "relation" but if you look at the second
English choice, it's "the relation". Instead of figuring out a way to train the computer
to understand English articles, they just shoved the word "the" in as part of another
dictionary choice. So, yeah, they were doing a little bit of
cheating. But I only cheated a little bit! But it did not matter to the public. People
were really excited and, if you were a translating machine, the times were good. For now.
Because when we return to wrap up this story, things start to get ugly. The nerds are going
to be fighting over how computers should be translating and the public starts making a
mockery of grammar and the very existence of machine translation will hang in the balance.
Chomp!