From Chinese Room to Human Window

The debate in philosophy and cognitive science about the Chinese Room Argument has focused on whether it shows that machines can have minds. We present a quantitative argument which shows that Searle’s thought experiment is not relevant to Turing’s Test for intelligence. Instead, we consider a narrower form of Turing’s Test, one that is restricted to the playing of a chess endgame, in which the equivalent of Searle’s argument does apply. An analysis of time/space trade-offs in the playing of chess endgames shows that Michie’s concept of Human Window offers a hint of what a machine’s mental representations might need to be like to be considered equivalent to human cognition. keywords: Turing Test, Chinese Room, Human Window, computer chess, time-space trade-offs, Pareto optimality