He begins by asking the reader to imagine that John Searle, himself, was locked in a room full of Chinese symbols. In this analogy, he calls these symbols “the database.” He was given a manual in English called “the program,” and called “the computer.” Then the people on the other side of that room would pass Searle the symbols in Chinese, and then he would in turn decipher those symbols using his English textbook and return the correct answers. To the people on the other side of that wall, it would appear that Searle knew what his answers meant since they were correct. He uses this comparison to argue that Watson knew as many of his answers on Jeopardy as Searle did in that locked room. It was just programmed information that neither of them had.