“Each team divides into two groups—one group asks questions from outside the doors, while the other group enters the rooms to answer.
Please note: each answer will come with four false options alongside the correct answer, for a total of five choices.
When the player inside has finished answering, their response will appear on the corresponding door. The players outside must then identify which door conceals their actual teammate. Choose correctly, and both inside and outside players advance. But choose a false answer, and both inside and outside players are immediately eliminated.”
The Clown raised a hand and snapped its fingers. The five doors behind it swung open in unison, revealing empty white rooms, all identical.
“Now then, you two Kings—please send your subjects into the rooms.”
The Clown looked at them with a grinning smile. “No need to rush—you have plenty of time to decide who goes inside to answer and who stays outside to ask.”
Bai Youwei and Shen Mo exchanged a glance.
They had only two people, so clearly one would go inside and one would stay out. On Hans’s side, four people would need to enter.
“The theme of this game is the Chinese Room,” Bai Youwei said.
“Mm.” Shen Mo nodded. “One of the ten great philosophical paradoxes. The referee choosing this theme must have its reasons.”
He looked toward the five doors and spoke slowly. “The ‘false options’ they’re referring to—those would be artificial intelligences, I assume.”
The Chinese Room was originally proposed by American philosopher John Searle. The thought experiment imagined a person who only spoke English, sealed inside a room. They had a book containing Chinese translation rules, along with plenty of paper and pens. Slips of paper with Chinese writing were passed through a small window into the room, and the person inside would use the book to translate the text and reply in Chinese. Though they understood not a word of Chinese, they could make anyone outside the room believe they could speak it fluently.
The experiment was designed to refute the notion that artificial intelligence could truly think—arguing that a computer cannot genuinely understand the information it receives, but can give the impression of intelligence by running certain programs.
Hans’s group clearly knew this famous thought experiment as well. He conferred quietly with his teammates for a moment, then addressed the referee. “Could you be more specific about how the false options will interfere?”
“Ahh, well…” The Clown meandered over on its unicycle. “They’ll do their best to mimic you—learn the way you speak.”
“Will they access our minds?” Hans asked carefully. “…Specifically, our memories?”
Bai Youwei couldn’t help glancing at him. That was a clever approach to cracking the game. If they focused on memories, no AI imitation would matter.
For example, she could ask Shen Mo: where was their first kiss?
An AI would never be able to answer that.
“Of course not~!” The Clown explained cheerfully. “They can only analyze and learn from what you’ve already revealed. What’s in your hearts—that, they have no way of knowing~!”
“However…”
The Clown’s voice shifted abruptly. Its mouth stretched wider, the grin twisting to something so exaggerated it sent a chill down the spine.
“Inside the rooms, the order in which players answer is randomized. So if you end up questioning the wrong person… well, that’s a shame.”
Bai Youwei frowned. If that was the case… using shared memories to design questions wouldn’t work after all.
Hans asked again, “Does the questioning side have any restrictions? Can anything be asked?”
The Clown replied, “You may ask anything—but the answer field inside can only hold twenty characters.”
So trying to expose inconsistencies through lengthy, elaborate questions was also out of the question.
Hans turned and conferred with his teammates quietly for a moment, then spoke up. “Referee, we’ve made our decision. These four will go inside to answer.”
—