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From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Chinese Room Experiment: empirical tests
Message-ID: <15799@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 26 Nov 90 22:55:02 GMT
References: <7852@uwm.edu>
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(Note:  I am cross-posting this to comp.ai.philosophy, since that is where
these discussions belong;  and I hope future debate will be conducted there.)

In article <7852@uwm.edu> markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark William Hopkins) writes:
>
>The concept is real simple.  Try to learn a new language by imitation.
>
>So here's what you should do: take out about 10 books written in a language
>you
>don't understand (like 10 books written in Spanish).  The language can be one
>that uses the Latin alphabet, or not.  It doesn't matter.
>
>Rewrite the exact contents of each book.  That means, WRITE the contents,
>don't
>analyse them.  Don't even think about what it all might mean, just write it.
>And write it all.
>
>This is what will happen.  Within about 60 minutes your brain WILL begin to
>adapt itself to the regularities of the language.  In one day (supposing you
>work about 8 hours that day), you will already have a good feel for the
>syntax of the language.  In about 3 to 5 days, you'll gradually begin to
>recognize stylistic regularities.
>
I noticed that the first reaction to this proposal was one of self-righteous
skepticism.  Unfortunately, it is very hard to deal with this situation with
anything other than anecdotal evidence.  Having said that, let me throw out
two such anecdotes.

One is personal.  When I was a graduate student, we used to eat at a Chinese
restaurant whose Chinese menu differed from the English menu.  One of our group
made up a pony, but the waiters refused to let us order by pointing.  The
eventual compromise which was established with the management was that we
would be allowed to WRITE our orders.  It was amazing how little time it
took to begin to assimilate knowledge of how Chinese characters were put
together and even to "parse" those symbols in terms of components which
referred to specific food items.  (Note that James McCawley has now taken
some of the fun out of this exercise with his EATER'S GUIDE TO CHINESE
CHARACTERS, but I suspect that variations on this anecdote will continue
to unfold among Chinese food fanatics.)

The other anecdote is not personal but IS pedagogical.  Many decades ago, a
fundamental element in the instruction of counterpoint at the Curtis Institute
of Music involved copying out entire works by Palestrina.  (This approach is,
to the best of my knowledge, no longer in practice.)  The point here is that
the study of counterpoint involves learning a vast complex of constraint rules
with little guidance about what to do with them.  Copying "real" music gave the
student an opportunity to observe the rules in action without having everything
pointed out to him explicitly.  The assumption was that there was something to
be gained by picking up the habit of "writing Palestrina;"  and for quite some
time this was recognized as a valid pedagogical approach.  (Perhaps we are
encouraged to write quotations down on 3 X 5 cards not only as a source of
reference material but also as an exercise in writing someone else's text.)

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