Conceived and performed primarily in order to attract governmental and public interest and funding by showing the possibilities of machine translation, it was by no means a fully featured system: It had only six grammar rules and 250 lexical items in its vocabulary (of stems and endings). Words in the vocabulary were in the fields of politics, law, mathematics, chemistry, metallurgy, communications and military affairs. Vocabulary was punched onto
punch cards. This complete dictionary was never fully shown (only the extended one from Garvin's article). Apart from general topics, the system was specialized in the domain of
organic chemistry. Jerome Weisner supported the idea and offered finance from the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT.
Leon Dostert had been invited to the project for his previous experience with the automatic correction of translations (back then 'mechanical translation'); his interpretation system had a strong impact on the
Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. The linguistics part of the demonstration was carried out for the most part by linguist
Paul Garvin who had also good knowledge of
Russian. Over 60
Romanized Russian statements from a wide range of political, legal, mathematical, and scientific topics were entered into the machine by a computer operator who knew no Russian, and the resulting English translations appeared on a printer. The sentences to be translated were carefully selected. Many operations for the demonstration were fitted to specific words and sentences. In addition, there was no relational or sentence analysis which could recognize the sentence structure. The approach was mostly 'lexicographical' based on a dictionary where a specific word had a connection with specific rules and steps. == Algorithm ==