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From: markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Mark William Hopkins)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Chinese Room Experiment: empirical tests
Message-ID: <7888@uwm.edu>
Date: 27 Nov 90 01:37:13 GMT
References: <7852@uwm.edu> <15799@venera.isi.edu>
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In article <15799@venera.isi.edu> smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) writes:
>>The concept is real simple.  Try to learn a new language by imitation.

...

>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...

This anecdote is a real interesting one, in that it's more or less where I
derived the idea from.  I learned some digital circuit design, a host of
programming languages, assembly languages and even binaries this way, with a
great deal of success.  And that's not counting the non-computer-related tasks
I applied the idea to :)

It just occurred to me a couple days ago to try it on natural language.  Forget
formal training, just go pick up books written in the languages and simply
copy them.  That was the idea.

But the question, having to do with the Chinese Room experiment, is whether
you can actually converge onto an understanding of the language in this way
WITHOUT ever 'cheating' by looking up translation references.  In all the
cases above I 'cheated' by getting a hold of electronics texts (for TTL
circuits), and language references, and by using my own high-level language
programs as compiler inputs (source code written in C is a 'translation' of
assembly code written, say, for a VAX).

Of course, if you really want to try this on a task where there's no
opportunity for cheating, you'd get a hold of all the Mayan Hieroglyphic
sources and copy them all by tracing.  I almost did that a few years ago... :)