I’d say that this is too simple and programmatic to be usefully described as a mental model. The amount of structure encoded in the computer program you describe is very small, compared with the amount of structure encoded in the neural networks themselves. (I agree that you can have arbitrarily simple models of very simple phenomena, but those aren’t the types of models I’m interested in here. I care about models which have some level of flexibility and generality, otherwise you can come up with dumb counterexamples like rocks “knowing” the laws of physics.)
As another analogy: would you say that the quicksort algorithm “knows” how to sort lists? I wouldn’t, because you can instead just say that the quicksort algorithm sorts lists, which conveys more information (because it avoids anthropomorphic implications). Similarly, the program you describe builds networks that are good at Go, and does so by making use of the rules of Go, but can’t do the sort of additional processing with respect to those rules which would make me want to talk about its knowledge of Go.
I’d say that this is too simple and programmatic to be usefully described as a mental model. The amount of structure encoded in the computer program you describe is very small, compared with the amount of structure encoded in the neural networks themselves. (I agree that you can have arbitrarily simple models of very simple phenomena, but those aren’t the types of models I’m interested in here. I care about models which have some level of flexibility and generality, otherwise you can come up with dumb counterexamples like rocks “knowing” the laws of physics.)
As another analogy: would you say that the quicksort algorithm “knows” how to sort lists? I wouldn’t, because you can instead just say that the quicksort algorithm sorts lists, which conveys more information (because it avoids anthropomorphic implications). Similarly, the program you describe builds networks that are good at Go, and does so by making use of the rules of Go, but can’t do the sort of additional processing with respect to those rules which would make me want to talk about its knowledge of Go.