Thoughts on the Chinese Room Problem

Data Skeptic

An interesting talking point in contrast to the Turing test is the Chinese Room Problem. It postulates a sealed room in which a person with no ability to read Chinese receives handwritten messages in Chinese. The room they are in is filled with books that contain possible responses to sentences in Chinese. The room's occupant is instructed with enough information to match the characters of input given to them, and lookup the corresponding output. They then copy the characters onto a sheet of paper and slip that pass that message out of the room. Assume there number of books of responses is large enough to contain a response for any possible input. The languages was selected (by an English speaker/reader) since Chinese is entirely foreign to them. The Spanish Room or German Room Problem wouldn't be quite as hard since the languages have similar enough origins that people can often get a sense of the meaning. With no background in Chinese writing, it seems unlikely an English speaker would interpret much, if anything at all, from inspecting the messa

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📆 2017-04-24 02:00