Chinese Room

A Chinese Room is a thought experiment which tries to show that a computer can't understand language the way that humans can. The experiment works like this: imagine you are locked in a room and you are given some sheets of paper with words written in Chinese on them. You have no idea what the words mean, but you have a set of rules that tell you what to do when given certain words. So using the rules, you follow the instructions on the paper to figure out what to do with the words that you've been given. This is what computers do when they are processing language, except the paper in the room would be replaced by a computer program. Even though you followed the rules to answer the questions in the paper, you still don't understand anything about the Chinese language. The same is true for computers; even though they can answer questions written in certain languages, they don't actually understand the meaning of the words or the language itself.