Nasa Uses Sanskrit To Program Artificial Intelligence

Inaccurate title. This isn't about Sanskrit, it's about certain schools of pre-modern Indian linguistics (which are very interesting and worthy subjects). Sanskrit is a beautiful language with an incredible literary canon, but there's nothing special about it that makes it stand apart from any other human language. Any other old Indo-European language possesses the same properties. Regrettably, Hindutva activists and their Western sycophants talk it up.

This is attributed to a 1985 writing by the (obscure) author named in the post here in many other online copy-and-paste postings of this same story. By now, there should be some follow-up on this, including identifying who "Rick Briggs" really is (just an imaginary character in an urban legend, or a real person from decades ago?) and what further artificial intelligence research has found out about various human languages.

By coincidence, I was just looking up reviews of the excellent book Mathematics in India by Kim Plofker,

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691120676

which I read a few years ago, just before I saw this post. There has been a lot of new scholarship about ancient India both in India and around the world since this submitted article was supposedly originally written, and here on Hacker NEWS we should be looking at more up-to-date information, I think.