jim@sri-unix (11/23/82)
John Searls of the University of California at Berkeley gave this counterexample to the Turing Test for artificial intellegence at a talk last week: Suppose you were put in a room with a big box of Chinese characters and you didn't know Chinese. Suppose also there was a hole in the door, so that people outside the room could pass you Chinese characters through the hole, and you could match them and combine them with characters in your box and send the result out the hole. If you were given a book in English which described how to combine the Chinese characters, and if the book was good enough, eventually you might get good enough at manipulating the formal symbols of Chinese to fool even a native Chinese speaker into thinking you knew Chinese, but you really don't. Searls maintains that computers are good tools for simulating intellegence and researching questions on intellegence, but that the real way to determine what is at the basis of intellegence is to look at the hardware.