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From: cjoslyn@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu (Cliff Joslyn)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Chinese Room by Shannon and McCarthy from 1956
Message-ID: <2896@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu>
Date: 1 Feb 90 16:30:25 GMT
References: <2891@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> <1307@oravax.UUCP>
Reply-To: cjoslyn@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu.cc.binghamton.edu (Cliff Joslyn)
Organization: SUNY Binghamton, NY
Lines: 37

In article <1307@oravax.UUCP> daryl@oravax.UUCP (Steven Daryl McCullough) writes:
>Test yourself: if I ask you "What is 6 times 7?" do you figure out,
>starting from the definition of multiplication, or do you recite a
>memorized answer?

Actually, I've got that memorized.  And so that is a mental performance
that doesn't rely on my intelligence, becasue I could train a rat to do
it.  Not everyhting I do that is mental is also intelligent, just as
nothing my cat does, a lot of which is mental, is intelligence.

>If a machine passes the Turing test, then by the definition of
>passing, there is *no* performance difference between it and someone
>who can *really* think. So why should we care *how* it does the
>thinking?

Now that pragmatic point is significant: Shannon does not say that we
could *tell* that the machine is not intelligent.  *For all we know* it
might be.  But that is an observation about the poverty of evidence and
inductive inference, which applies to any scientific decision we might
make, not strictly about the intelligence of systems.

I have always said that the Chinese room (and Shannon's observation)
shows that the TTT is a *necessary*, but not a *sufficient* condition
for intelligence.

>There is also a very practical side to this question: a lookup table
>for all possible input histories would be absolutely enormous! 

Another important pragmatic problem: construction of the Chinese room is
physically impossible.  Question: in passing the TTT, does the system
have to respond *as quickly* as a human?

-- 
O------------------------------------------------------------------------->
| Cliff Joslyn, Cybernetician at Large, cjoslyn@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu
| Systems Science, SUNY Binghamton, Box 1070, Binghamton NY 13901, USA
V All the world is biscuit shaped. . .