Haugeland, John (Editor) Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, and Artificial Intelligence The MIT Press: Boston, MA

Searle’s Chinese Room

Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.

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Nicholas Negroponte is moving forward with his plans to unveil a sub $100 laptop to provide to children around the world. I posted on this a while ago on Banapana but despite my suggestion, it’s great to see them moving forward with this project and creating what looks like a really innovative laptop.

As usual today it wasn’t so much one article in particular that caught my eye but rather the overlap that existed between several. MIT has gotten serious about building a $100 laptop for kids. But kids don’t want laptops, they want video game machines — especially portable ones. Read more…