A famous claim says NASA found Sanskrit the ideal language for artificial intelligence.
Often traced to Rick Briggs' 1985 AI Magazine article on using 'śāstric Sanskrit' for knowledge representation (semantic nets).
— Rick Briggs, AI Magazine (1985)
Natural-language processing and knowledge representation.
A popular claim that doesn't hold up — here's the honest story.
Here's the real story behind a very forwarded claim. In 1985 Rick Briggs, a researcher (at a NASA centre), published a paper arguing that the rigorous, unambiguous style of classical Sanskrit grammar resembles the formal 'semantic net' representations AI uses — an interesting point about śāstric Sanskrit's precision.
What it is NOT: 'NASA officially declared Sanskrit the best/only language for computers' is a myth. NASA made no such declaration, no software runs in Sanskrit, and natural languages (Sanskrit included) are far too ambiguous to be programming languages. The defensible kernel: the highly systematic, Pāṇinian style of Sanskrit grammar is genuinely interesting to computational linguistics. The viral version vastly overstates it.