[Someone]

Firstly, we have done similar things. For example, we have/had http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METEO_System for weather reports (use "machine translation weather reports" to google Scientific literature. Among others, that finds information that work is being done on a Croatian version of this). I think there have been successes in the medical field, too, but cannot find them.

However, this 'knowledge engineering' approach to AI has fallen somewhat out of fashion a bit in favourite of statistical methods (however, I don't think anybody does statistics 'from scratch'. For example, in NLP, you could try to statistically learn the definite articles in English, but hard-coding that 'the' is the only one will get you results faster.