No right answer

If the last few slides felt like the ground moving, that's the right reaction.

The Chinese Room isn't a puzzle with a tidy solution waiting at the end. Philosophers, cognitive scientists, and AI researchers have argued over it for more than forty years and landed nowhere. You didn't miss the answer. There isn't one yet.

So you can let it stay open. The one thing to carry forward is small and solid: whether a machine understands is a much harder question than it first looks. That's enough to keep going.