Almost 20 years before Searle, a short fictional story by A.Dneprov, "The game", was published in the Soviet pop-science magazine "Knowledge is Power". Not only had it described the essence of the Chinese room setup, it also came to the same conclusion:

> If you, being structural elements of some logical pattern, had no idea of what you were doing, then can we really argue about the ‘thoughts’ of electronic devices made of different parts which are deemed incapable of any thinking even by the most fervent followers of the electronic-brain concept? You know all these parts: radio tubes, semiconductors, magnetic matrixes, etc. I think our game gave us the right answer to the question ‘Can machines think?’ We’ve proven that even the most perfect simulation of machine thinking is not the thinking process itself, which is a higher form of motion of living matter. [1]

[1] A Russian Chinese Room story antedating Searle’s 1980 discussion http://www.hardproblem.ru/en/posts/Events/a-russian-chinese-...