The Chinese Room thought expirement aims to answer if a machine can ever be truly intelligent.
A man sits in a room. He is told to translate some chinese text written on a slip of paper that is passed under the door. He has a chinese → english translation textbook in front of him. Every time he receives a note, he uses the textbook to find the translation.
Then, he writes a response in english, and uses a second english → chinese textbook to translate it back to chinese. He copies down the chinese symbols from the second textbook onto the slip of paper and sends it back under the door.
Does the man know Chinese? From the outside, it seems like he does. But really he’s just matching information.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TryOC83PH1g
Personally, I think the man still needs to have intelligence to match in the first place and even come up with a response. So I’m not sure if this disproves that a machine can be truly intelligent. But I don’t think machines are there just yet.