For a computer to understand causal inference and pass the 
Mini-Turing Test, the computer must understand the difference between seeing (observing an event) and doing (making the event happen). 

How to Pass Mini-Turing Test

John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument has a flaw: cheating is impossible. People challenge the mini-turing test because they believe it is easy to cheat since the machine can just memorize a list of questions, their answers, and then spit it out from memory, making it indistinguishable from how people actually think (through mental causal models). However, when trying to pass the mini-tuning test, even if there are a small number of causal variables, the number of questions grows astronomically, even more so when you continue to increase the number of variables. This means that the question-answer list would grow so large that it becomes improbably big. This can never simulate the intelligence of human beings. 

Flaw with Searle’s Chinese Room Argument

First, it is confined to causal reasoning, excluding other aspects of human intelligence such as vision and natural language. 
Second, we allow the contestant to encode the story in any convenient representation, unburdening the machine of the task of acquiring the story from its own personal experience.

How is Mini-Turing Test different from the regular one?

The Mini-Turing Test is a reduced version of the Turing Test that only assesses whether the machine is capable of performing causal inferences.

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

A machine passes this test if a human could perceive their interactions with the machine as human, indicating that the machine has successfully emulated human reasoning. 

Turing Test

Mini-Turing Test

Searle’s Chinese Room Argument has been used to criticize the ability of the Turing test to test actual intelligence. He proposes that someone be locked alone in a room with a rulebook for Chinese symbols, which represents the computer program. The person then receives batches of Chinese symbols. They subsequently follow the rule book and hand back Chinese outputs. The person in the room gets so good at following the rulebook and give back accurate answers that they are indistinguishable from a native speaker and passes the Turing test. 

However, Searle states that no matter how good this program is, the person in the room still does not know any Chinese. Therefore, computers are not actually intelligent for this reason, which makes the Turing Test inadequate.

John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument

He proposed to pass the turing test to not try to replicate an adult mind full of information but try to replicate a childs mind that has the capability and framework of learning new knowledge. His proposed strategy requires machines to gain casual knowledge in which hasn't been done yet. 


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