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First of four installments of a talk by Dr. Lloyd Dreger delivered at the 1990 Sinclair Expo. Establishes the philosophical framework: computer programs are purely formal/syntactic systems — they manipulate symbols without understanding them. Illustrates with three examples of syntactic-but-not-semantic tasks: chess (goal-directed tree branching), 20 Questions (binary branching with a learnable database), and Trivial Pursuit (keyword-indexed rote recall). Argues that none of these require cognition.