gjoly@NSS.CS.UCL.AC.UK ("G. Joly", Birkbeck) (02/29/88)
``Thinking Machines'' was the title of a recent Horizon programme on BBC television, featuring Hubert Dreyfuss, Marvin Minsky and John Searle. There was a demonstration of the Chinese Room with two Chinese actors and an English (only) speaking person in the room. Searle asserted that ``the room'' could not speak Chinese, since the operator inside had no knowledge of written Chinese; he was merely manipulating symbols (as computers do). But in terms of the Turing test, the room spoke Chinese, since it satisfied the basic ideas of the test. Agreed that the operator could not speak the language, but the language was spoken by the (language translation?) program he was following. The image was amusing. Does anybody have a ballpark figure for the time needed to run such a program ``by hand''? More or less than the age of the universe? Gordon Joly. gcj@maths.qmc.ac.uk gjoly@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk