QI has traced the core of the quotation to the work of an early researcher in artificial intelligence, Anthony Oettinger, who was trying to get a computer to manipulate the English language. In the magazine Scientific American in 1966, Oettinger describes a computer program that takes sentences as input and attempts to determine which words are acting as verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, etcetera [OET]. The example input he uses is “Time flies like an arrow”, but the task is complicated because the computer program must also work properly for sentences such as “Fruit flies like a banana” and “Time runners with a stop-watch”. Here is what he says: ...
