debray (11/10/82)
<flame on> Please! Please!! PLEASE!!! It's R-E-F-U-T-A-T-I-O-N , not r-e-f-u-t-I-a-t-i-o-n !!! While we're talking about symbol manipulation, let's manipulate symbols more carefully! <flame off> not afraid to sign my name, Saumya Debray , SUNY @ Stony Brook.
70:rogerh@sri-unix (11/24/82)
John Searls of Berkeley gave this counterexample to the Turing Test 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 ... people outside the room could pass you Chinese characters. ... If you were given a book in English which described how to combine the Chinese characters, ... eventually you might get good enough ... to fool (someone) 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. I contend that it is impossible to produce semantically "correct" sentences in a natural language by following only syntactic rules. In fact, it's hard enough to produce programs with the intended meaning. This leads to the conclusion that a question requiring a thoughtful answer would trip the Chinese Turing-person up, just as a question requiring a thoughtful answer will trip up, eg, Eliza. I think Searls makes a good point, that we must be careful not to accept Eliza as an intelligent program. That was never intended, was it? I also am not sure that what we call thinking does not have its basis in our emotions, so I may agree entirely with Searls, but his argument is specious. Roger Hayes University of Arizona (...purdue!arizona!rogerh)
pwp (11/24/82)
Yes, but can't anything done in hardware be simulated in software? Maybe a little slow but... => Paul Placeway osu-dbs!pwp
neiman (11/24/82)
It could also be argued that the ability to read the book on Chinese syntax implies a certain degree of intelligence...
kramer (11/25/82)
Dennet and Hofstadter give good counter arguments to Searle's position in "The Mind's Eye". Dennet also talks about it in the current issue of the AI journal. The point is that it is not the man in the room who understands chinese, but rather the total entity formed by the man and the room and the characters etc.
jerry (11/26/82)
Another (vague) reference. Sometime last spring there was an exchange in the New York Review of Books. I'm not sure, but I think there was a review by Hofstadter of a book by Searle, and a latter exchange of letters. Jerry Schwarz eagle!jerry
davy (11/30/82)
#R:az70:-12900:pur-ee:4500005:000:328 pur-ee!davy Nov 29 11:29:00 1982 I'm sorry to appear so dumb here, but I don't know what the Turing Test is. I've heard of it, and have a general idea what it implies, but I would appreciate it if someone could MAIL me a description or a reference to same. Thanks, --Dave Curry decvax!pur-ee!davy ucbvax!pur-ee!davy ihnss!pur-ee!davy harpo!pur-ee!davy