[soneil]

I think it's easy to underestimate how much difference (1) makes. Take the famous line "thequickbrownfoxjumpsoverthelazydog" - and think how you'd parse that out programatically. You'd start at the start, reading each character in, comparing it against a dictionary, and when you decide you have a whole word - then you can split that word out - and then continue on to the next.

But you can't really do this in parallel as the start for each word depends on the previous split already being known.

If it was simply law that every word in existence was 5 characters, you could parse this out with zero lookups, zero knowledge. "accurately" isn't so much the issue, it's that you have to decode each instruction to know where the next starts.