Comment by Dn_Ab
14 years ago
Interesting. But maybe a better title would be: A Spellchecker Used To Require A Major Feat of Software Engineering.
Some may say something is lost and resources wasted - taken for granted as we now brute force our way through such problems. Surely going backwards?
but now we are, a million times a second; free to disambiguate a word's meaning, check its part of speech, figure out whether its a named entity or an address, figure out if it is a key topic in the document we are looking at and write basic sentences. I agree. That is progress.
Some may say something is lost and resources wasted - taken for granted as we now brute force our way through such problems. Surely going backwards?
I think it is progress: Yes, we can brute force today through the problems that were a feat a decade or two ago. But: Not having to solve those problems frees a lot of time. Time that can be spent on problems that are a major feat today.