We're starting to have discussions, not lectures! =)

The course's getting more interesting. This morning was about the possibility of computer thinking... we studied an analogy called the Chinese Room. Basically, there is a closed room with an input device that displays Chinese characters, an output device that displays Chinese characters, a monolinguistic English speaking person, and a rule ledger, written so that the English-speaker can understand the rules, specifying which characters to display when certain characters are input. This is combined with the Turing Test. One version is... basically, if a professional is unable to discern the difference between a computer's response and a human's response, the computer is said to be intelligent... supposedly. However, this Chinese Room is an analogy for a computer. And if the rule ledger is written well enough, then this English guy's responses would be indescernible from a fluent Chinese speaker. He would pass the Turing Test. However, the person doesn't understand Chinese. So he might be able to pass the Turing Test without understanding it. Same thing with computers. Maybe in the future they'll be able to pass the Turing Test, but that still won't indicate that they can think. That took up this morning's discussion. The afternoon discussion was about whether humans are machines and to what level. Pretty interesting discussion. Of course, people have different views on abstract concepts such as souls, religion, consciousness, free will, definition of a human, definition of a machine, intelligence, inventiveness, etc. etc. etc... But it was pretty thought-provoking and interesting. Well, there's supposed to be a dance tonight... a lot of people don't seem very excited, surprisingly. One of the other camps here is having it and... it seems that we're inviting them along on a movie thing, and so they had to invite us back, so... we're going to their dance for some reason. Interesting...