You might well be 100% right. I'd like to see the Japanese succeed, actually.
However, it was simply not possible for anyone to succeed at AI in the early 80's. It took some Nobel-prize-winning software, a change of approach, and a massive increase in compute power to finally break through.
I think that we also needed a much larger training corpus than was available in the 1980s. Back then the largest textual data sets were orders of magnitude smaller.
However, it was simply not possible for anyone to succeed at AI in the early 80's. It took some Nobel-prize-winning software, a change of approach, and a massive increase in compute power to finally break through.