Компьютерная техника. Еремина Н.В. - 34 стр.

then for a machine to understand man, or even another machine? Machines
translators would be an enormous boon (благо), especially to science and technology.
A machine translator would obviously be a great aid.
        In the 80s a machine was developed that can optically scan the written
characters and print out the translation. It has a program that translates Chinese into
English and English into Chinese. At a press demonstration the programmer asked for
a phrase to translate and a reporter said:
        "Out of sight, out of mind." The phrase was dutifully fed into the computer,
which replied, by printing out a siring of Chinese characters. "There," said the
programmer, "that means 'out of sight, out of mind'."
        The reporter was skeptical. "I don't know Chinese and I don't know that that
means 'out of sight, out of mind'."
        "Well," replied the engineer, "it's really' quite simple. We'll ask the other
program to translate the Chinese into English."
        And so once again a string of characters, this time Chinese, was fed into the
computer. The translation was typed out almost immediately and it read: "invisible
idiot".



      6.4 Exercises

      6.4.1 Try to guess the meaning of the words given in italics in the text
      6.4.2 Translate the sentences marked with an asterisk


      6.4.3 Enjoy one more example of computers' abilities to speak


        In order to make communication between man and machine as painless and
easy as possible, the computer is being thought not only to speak but also to listen.
The Auto-notices Corporation has built a system completed with audio analyses and
all of the complex electronics needed to give a computer "cars" that will actually hear
(he words spoken into its microphone. The vocabulary is still limited. During a
demonstration, the engineer spoke slowly and distinctly a handful of the computer's
words, and the latter dutifully typed them back. But on one word it failed. While
counting "one, two, three," the computer typed back, "one, two, four." Whereupon the
demonstrator snapped "idiot," and the computer, in a veritable machine version of
British aplomb, calmly replied, "Not in vocabulary."

      6.4.4 Try to guess the meaning of the words given in italics in the text