Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!texbell!rutgers!umn-d-ub!cs.umn.edu!hougen
From: hougen@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu (Dean Hougen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Chinese Room by Shannon and McCarthy from 1956
Summary: in principal objection to real world answer
Message-ID: <1990Feb1.183841.8193@umn-cs.cs.umn.edu>
Date: 1 Feb 90 18:38:41 GMT
References: <2891@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu>
Organization: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis - CSCI Dept.
Lines: 22

In article <2891@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu>,
 cjoslyn@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu (Cliff Joslyn) writes:
Shannon and McCarthy say:

>"A disadvantage of the Turing definition of thinking is that it is
>possible, in principle, to design a machine with a complete set of
>arbitrarily chosen responses to all possible input stimuli. ... "

Perhaps a disadvantage *in principle*, but the "Turing definition of 
thinking" (I think this is a bad phrasing of what Turing was up to)
was intended to answer the real world question, "Can machines think?"
Supposing that the real world is different than it really is to object
to Turing seems quite silly, IMHO.  (For those who haven't seen it:
the construction of the set of responses for a real world machine would
have to start at some time and end at some time - therefore the machine
would only be ready to respond to some finite set of input stimuli, and
would fail the test badly if the questioner strayed outside that set.)

Dean Hougen
--
"And all you touch and all you see
 Is all your life will ever be."  - Pink Floyd