I first learned about Chinese Rooms in the last book I finished:
Peter Watts Blindsight [
http://www.rifters.com/blindsight/BS_main.htm].
Quote:Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.
Now replace the English speaker with an AI (artificial intelligence) program and you have this abstract contraption known as a Chinese Room.
Three somewhat decent sources that try to explain this very difficult thought/computer experiment:
http://www.iep.utm.edu/chineser/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/
http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/mitpress/0262025485/cache/chap3.pdf
Computing has progressed and evolved a long way from the time of Searle and Turing.
Are internet bots basic forms of Chinese Room AI's? Or are they too constrained to their preprogrammed tasks to qualify as a Chinese room? Could dilli333 [
http://able2know.org/user/dilli333/] actually be a form of a Chinese Room?
I apologize for not being able to express myself more fluently on this topic. I barely understand it but it fascinates me nevertheless.
Can someone boil this down into an academically easy to swallow porridge for a computer buffoon like me?
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