For the British video game development studio, see The Chinese Room.
Illustration of Searle's Chinese room
The Chinese room is a thought experiment presented by John Searle to challenge the claim that it is possible for a computer running a program to have a "mind" and "consciousness"[a] in the same sense that people do, simply by virtue of running the right program. The experiment is intended to help refute a philosophical position that Searle named "strong AI":
"The appropriately programmed computer with the right inputs and outputs would thereby have a mind in exactly the same sense human beings have minds."[b]
To contest this view, Searle writes in his first description of the argument: "Suppose that I'm locked in a room and ... that I know no Chinese, either written or spoken". He further supposes that he has a set of rules in English that "enable me to correlate one set of formal symbols with another set of formal symbols", that is, the Chinese characters. These rules allow him to respond, in written Chinese, to questions, also written in Chinese, in such a way that the posers of the questions – who do understand Chinese – are convinced that Searle can actually understand the Chinese conversation too, even though he cannot. Similarly, he argues that if there is a computer program that allows a computer to carry on an intelligent conversation in a written language, the computer executing the program would not understand the conversation either.