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A comment on The Chinese Room Argument. Parent comment

Re:The Chinese Room Argument by nullc on Sunday February 03, 2019 @05:28PM (#19072649)
Another way to highlight the folly of The Chinese Room is to consider a different alternative:

Imagine you create a system of filing cabnets that encode rules to compute AlphaGo on encrypted inputs. This is _clearly_ conceptually possible (if not practical just due to the sheer cost and size).

This system would, as AlphaGo does, be the worlds strongest go player. Even though the human inside may not understand go at all (and certainly wouldn't understand the game they were helping to play, as all the moves would be encrypted).

In this form we see The Chinese Room not as as evidence against AI as intended, but if the argument actually held (and wasn't just a form of intellectually low misdirection) it would be very strong evidence that its idea of "understanding" is of no practical use. ... since what would "understanding" even mean if we couldn't even say that the worlds best go player didn't understand the game at all?

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Re:The Chinese Room Argument by ForHackernews on Sunday February 03, 2019 @05:46PM (#19072738)
I'm happy to say that the world's best Go playing algorithm doesn't understand the game at all. AlphaZero doesn't understand anything because there's no semantic content or metacognition to anything it does. It just takes inputs and optimizes outputs. It's a very fancy probabilistic calculator.
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