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@ferrix @charliejane The Chinese Room thought experiment asks whether intelligence can be implemented as a program, and in my opinion the supposed "obvious" answer "no" is wrong.

If the instructions in my books are allowed to be arbitrarily complex I don't see why they couldn't simulate a brain, its experiences and its state. It's just that the pen and pencil implementation would be excrutiatingly slow, and it wouldn't mean that I as the executing processor would understand anything.

The National Library of Thailand experiment asks whether with access only to the text of a language without any connection to anything else you can develop an understanding of the language. In this case my opinion is that the answer is obviously "no".