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BoingBoing is a godsend (or a curse) for we trivia heads.

They have just such interesting ….stuff.

Here’s one.

Enter an English phrase and the machine translates it into Japanese and back into English – backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards – until it finds what it calls “Equilibrium”, which I suppose means that the reverse translation from Japanese matches the original English phrase.

I’m not convinced that it works that well, but maybe Meg can tell us.

I started out with “Good morning”

It came back with “That didn’t even make that much sense in English”

So I tried that.

After 25 iterations, it said “It is doubtful that this phrase will ever reach equilibrium.”

So I tried that.

It only took 8 tries to come up with “This is necessary to achieve the balance of the phrase.”

So I tried “Lost in translation”