Chinese room

The Chinese room is a thought experiment devised by philosopher John Searle to prove his point that no matter how well a computer program, such as a chatbot which receives sentences from a human and replies as if it were a person, simulates the ability to understand a language, the program itself does not actually understand human language. In Searle's thought experiment, an English-speaking person who doesn't speak Chinese sits in a room with a book written in English that contains a set of instructions which allow him to answer any Chinese question in Chinese. When Chinese questions are passed into the room, the English-speaking person could write down a response in Chinese. The English speaker reading English instructions, like a chatbot reading computer code, is able to respond to Chinese questions but does not actually understand Chinese.