<i>[...] the book is just the &quot;Chinese language understanding&quot; part of the brain&#x2F;knowledge refactored out.</i><p>Actually the rule book is the entire brain, not only the part understanding Chinese. Decoding the Chinese symbols is kind of the easiest part but after that you have to understand the meaning of the question, find the answer to it in your model of the world and finally spell out the answer in Chinese again.<p>The focus on the Chinese language is kind of a red herring and obscures the amount of information about and understanding of the world that has to be encoded in the rule book to allow answering arbitrary questions. That the questions are and the answers have to be in Chinese is really not much more than a minor twist, a minor annoyance, the whole setup would not lose much if questions, answers and the rule book were all in the first language of the operator because his ability to understand the questions and think about them is absolutely irrelevant if he blindly follows the rule book.