Week 3: Rules, and a story we cannot source

This week

Bench

10 March 2027 Trace it back tracing it to the source

Slides

Open the deck

Specimens

The vodka is good but the meat is rotten

The vodka is good but the meat is rotten apocryphal

no va

The Chevrolet Nova apocryphal

On 7 January 1954 a joint Georgetown and IBM demonstration translated a few dozen Russian sentences into English with a vocabulary of around 250 words and six grammar rules. It was reported as a solved problem within five years. In 1966 the ALPAC report concluded otherwise and the funding stopped.

That is the documented part. The part everyone actually repeats is that some early system rendered the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak as the vodka is good but the meat is rotten, and no version of that story names a system, a date, or a witness.

Outline#

• what a six-rule system can and cannot get wrong
• ALPAC, and what “quality” meant to the people who measured it
• the vodka story, and the shape of an unsourceable claim
• a field that studies unreliable text, told through its own