Wasted Cycles

Just stumbled on this blog post by a developer for the Cuil search engine, in which he tries to readjust the expectations of some users about their new automated encyclopedia feature (so they call it), called CPedia. One phrase, which greatly depicts one of the main problems with natural language processing, caught my attention:

“The notion of the identity of objects is not a settled matter – the classic example is Theseus’s Ship, but a simple one is of an axe: if you replace the handle twice, and the head once, is it still the same axe?”

http://www.cuil.com/info/blog/2010/04/13/cpedia-and-its-detractors