Quantum Mechanics, the Chinese Room Experiment and the Limits of Understanding

Searle first proposed the Chinese room experiment in 1980. At the time, artificial intelligence researchers, who have always been prone to mood swings, were cocky. Some claimed that machines would soon pass the Turing test, a means of determining whether a machine "thinks." Computer pioneer Alan Turing proposed in 1950 that questions be fed to a machine and a human. If we cannot distinguish the machine's answers from the human's, then we must grant that the machine does indeed think.