Chinese Room

Chinese room is a thought experiment used to show that a symbol processing machine can never be labelled as an intelligent machine or a machine with a “mind”. There is a very famous hypothesis called Turing’s “polite convention”, “If a machine acts as intelligently as a human being, then it is as intelligent as a human being”. Is it true? You will see.

Before we start the experiment, we must think about a question – If a machine can answer questions in Chinese as fluently and naturally as a native speaker, does it necessarily mean that the machine can understand Chinese?

Let’s assume that there is a machine which can only understand English locked in an isolated room. In that room, there is a thorough and complete manual of how to answer questions in Chinese written in English. There are also necessary stationery like paper and pen in that room.

A Chinese native speaker writes questions in Chinese on a piece of paper and sends the piece of paper into the room through a slot. Then the machine answers the question by looking up the answer in the English manual, writes the answer on another piece of paper and sends it back. From the result, the native speaker finds that the answer is completely right and natural. The native speaker may assert that the machine can understand Chinese very well.

However, is it true? Actually, our assumption is that the machine can only understand and knows nothing about Chinese. But it just seems unreal for the native speaker because he gets right and natural answers from that room. There must be someone who understands Chinese. Then who is this mysterious guy?

If you are interested in it, you may try to figure it out yourself.