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Homework 6: Can a computer think? Is artificial intelligence really possible? What is necessary for thought? What would a computer have to have in order to think? Here are a couple of ways that this issue has been examined in the past (adapted from Readings in Language and Mind ed. By Heimir Geirsson and Michael Losonsky): I. The Turing Test, from Alan Turing’s celebrated paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950). Can a machine successfully play the imitation game? The original imitation game is played by three people: a male, a female, and an interrogator who cannot see or hear the other two players. The interrogator’s task is to find out who is male and who is female on the basis of written questions and answers. What makes the game interesting is that one of the players tries to fool the interrogator about his or her sexual identity while the other player gives honest answers. The Turing Test replaces the two players of different sexes with a human and a digital computer. The interrogator’s objective is to determine which of the two players is human and which is the computer. Turing’s question is “Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as when it is played with a male and a female?” Turing believed this would be possible within 50 years of writing his article. Turing’s work suggested that intelligence in general, including human intelligence, should be characterized in terms of the carrying out of a computation over uninterpreted symbols according to a finite set of rules. This has been the cornerstone of classical artificial intelligence. The basic idea is that in some sense our brains implement a set of symbols and rules for manipulating symbols in much the same way that your PC stores symbols and programs. II. Searle’s Chinese Room, from his paper “Is the Brain’s Mind a Computer Program?” (1980). Searle challenged the Turing Test in the following way. Imagine a non-Chinese speaker locked in a room with a rule book in English matching Chinese symbols with other Chinese symbols. The rules identify the symbols entirely by their shapes, not by their meanings. Outside of the room there is a small group of people who understand Chinese and who hand the non-Chinese speaker Chinese symbols to which she is supposed to respond with the help of the rule book. With this help, the non-Chinese speaker is able to respond to the symbols in a way that might be expected of a native Chinese speaker. In other words, she passes the Turing Test. In spite of that, Searle points out, she does not understand Chinese, nor is it plausible to claim that the room understands Chinese. If we look at the rule book as being a computer program, the non-Chinese speaker as being the processor, those who wrote the rule book as the programmers, the input as data and the output as answers, then we can look at the Chinese room as being a symbol processor, much like computers. Given that, and given that the system (the Chinese room) does not understand Chinese, Searle concludes that no pure syntax processor is capable of thought and understanding. Thought requires mental content, or semantics, and syntax does not yield semantics, Searle argues.