The Chinese Room Thought Experiment

The core question here is, well, what is it to understand something? I mean, you've laid out, it can't just be predicting the next word. So there's an old thought at this point, old thought experiment that I think is still an important one when thinking about these issues. Imagine that you are locked inside of a room with a whole bunch of characters and symbols that mean nothing to you but they're basically symbol with an arrow to another symbol. We might ask, does the room understand? I'm pretty inclined to say, no, it doesn't. Or I even know what that means.