The Chinese room

You are locked in a room with a vast rule book written in English. Through a slot come cards covered in Chinese characters, which you do not read. The rule book tells you, for each pattern of characters, which characters to copy onto a reply card and push back out. The rules are so good that the people outside, who are fluent, are convinced they are corresponding with a native speaker. You could do this for years and never learn what any card says.

Searle's claim is that the room shows a computer running a program cannot understand anything, because you are doing exactly what the computer does and you understand nothing. Does the argument succeed?