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Article 5516 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: barryp@otago.ac.nz
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Chinese Room
Message-ID: <1992May9.202558.2728@otago.ac.nz>
Date: 9 May 92 07:25:58 GMT
References: <841@kepler1.rentec.com>
Organization: University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
Lines: 20

In article <841@kepler1.rentec.com>, fcaggian@rentec.com (Frank Caggiano) writes:
> Can anyone tell me if the chinese room has ever been attempted
> using humans and what the results were?  Is it even possible?
> 
It is certainly possible to write a book to run the Chinese room but the
practical difficulties are immense.  First the person would have to decode the
Chinese character (it takes Chinese speakers minutes to look up a character in
a dictionary, so how long would it take someone who has no knowlwedge of them).
Second they would have to have rules for what to do with them to make
intelligible replies.  (The easiest set of rules to apply would parse the 
inputs, translate them into outputs but this would imply understanding)

In practice it would be impossible for a human to do this without some computer
to help.  The computer could in fact do all the work and the human just monitor
the input and output marvelling at how little he could make of it.  In fact we
could let the human go off to have a cup of tea and the whole process would
continue quite happily.  ie the human would then be irrelevant and we are left
with the original problem is the program/computer intelligent.

Barry Phease


