Great reference. This highlights an interesting property of 'reasonably-solved' problems like spell checking and why they might be so much more straightforward

Great reference. This highlights an interesting property of 'reasonably-solved' problems like spell checking and why they might be so much more straightforward now. It's often not that we've developed groundbreaking algorithms that make solving the underlying problems intrinsically easier - the techniques we're using (like ngram modeling, in this case) may be the result of research work decades ago. Instead the difference is that the fruit of that prior work has been implemented and made available in more accessible forms (libraries and source code) - and becomes easier to re-use, reason about, and modify thanks to abstraction and languages that have evolved to handle similar problems in a more expressible manner. (upgrades in hardware and resources certainly help advancement too, but spell checking's probably a good example of a situation where an efficiently-designed implementation's likely to be noticeably more responsive, whether it's 1980 or 2020)