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Article 2073 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: The Calculus Room
Message-ID: <1991Dec12.195125.14719@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 12 Dec 91 19:51:25 GMT
References: <YAMAUCHI.91Dec5040116@heron.cs.rochester.edu> <1991Dec5.191043.10565@psych.toronto.edu> <44801@mimsy.umd.edu>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 46


 Let's try a modification of Searle's "Chinese Room" argument.  I believe this 
is a good analogy.

 We call this "The Calculus Room".

 It is claimed that symbolic algebra programs such as MACSYMA are as good as a 
second semester calculus student.  We will use the analogue of the "Chinese 
Room" experiment to demonstrate the falsity of this claim.

 At one side of the room sits a computer, running MACSYMA.  At the other side 
sits a second semester calculus student, who is doing work at the level that 
might earn him a grade of B.

 Gentlemen, start your thinking:

    Question to MACSYMA:  What is 1+1 ?
    Answer                        2   .

    Question to student:  What is 1+1 ?
    Answer                        2   .

 Clearly MACSYMA has passed the Turing test.  His response is 
indistinguishable from that of the student.

 However it is obvious that the student did not use any second-semester 
calculus knowledge in his answer.  Therefore the computer is not comparable to 
a second semester calculus student.

   ----------

 Naturally some will argue that the above scenario is not a fair comparison.
Judgements are made about a difficult problem based on performance on an
inferior problem.

 Surely the Chinese room suffers the same failing.  The computer is said to
pass the Turing Test because it can do as well as humans who clearly do not
understand what they are doing in their inferior test which only requires
table lookups.  It is then concluded that the computer obviously must not
understand either.

-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115                                   +1-815-753-6940


