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Article 2081 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: daryl@oracorp.com
Subject: Re: Searle, again
Message-ID: <1991Dec13.030010.15837@oracorp.com>
Organization: ORA Corporation
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 1991 03:00:10 GMT

Joseph O'Rourke brings up the question again of whether a conversation
in Chinese can be interpreted as moves in a chess game. I think the answer
is clearly yes, although I'm not sure what the implications are for the
Chinese room. Anyway, the argument goes as follows:

Chess moves and Chinese conversations have completely different
semantics, of course, as well as different syntax. In order to
translate from one to another, we have to first remove all the syntax
and semantics, leaving the pure information content. We do this in
two steps:

      1. Code the Chinese messages in binary. (This can be done for any
         language with a discrete number of characters.)

      2. Use semantic data compression to remove the redundancy from the
         resulting bit stream.

These two steps give us a function F from Chinese to bit streams with the
properties:

    (a) It has an inverse, F^{-1}.
    (b) Each bit of the output stream is approximately equally likely to
        be a 1 as a 0 (even taking into account the syntax and semantics
        of Chinese; if this were not the case, further compression would
        be possible).

Similarly, we can come up with a function G from sequences of chess moves
into compressed bit streams. Then the function  H(x) == G^{-1}(F(x)) will
be a function taking us from a stream x of meaningful messages in Chinese
to a stream H(x) of meaningful chess moves.

I'm not sure how significant this result is, since all the meaning,
syntax and semantics from the Chinese conversation is removed by the
function F, so that what is left over is essentially a random sequence
of bits, which can be used as a random "oracle" to choose between
equally desirable moves in a chess game.

Daryl McCullough


