"In the early days of tackling these [machine translation] problems, computer scientists teamed with linguists and tried to code grammar. At IBM, a group including Mercer and Brown reasoned that the problems would be better solved using statistics and probabilities. (Their boss, Frederick Jelinek, liked to say, “Whenever I fire a linguist, the system gets better.”) "

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-21/how-renaissance-s-medallion-fund-became-finance-s-blackest-box