A robot sat for the math test during China's national college entrance exam, or gaokao, in the southwestern city of Chengdu on Wednesday, June 7, 2017. (Photo: China News Service/An Yuan)
(ECNS) -- The robot AI-MATHS developed by a company in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, has to improve its capability in understanding natural language to achieve a better score in the gaokao, China's national college entrance exam, China Youth Daily reports.
On June 7, AI-MATHS independently took two math tests from the national college exam without access to the Internet or any test bank. It finished the exam for liberal arts students in Beijing in 22 minutes, with a score of 105. It then spent another 10 minutes on the national test II and scored 100. Both full scores are 150.
Remarking on the robot scoring zero for a problem in the Beijing test, Lin Hui, CEO of its developer Zhunxingyunxue Technology, said it might "have had a problem in understanding natural language" as the problem involved an "unusual" description.
In the national test, a math teacher who reviewed the robot's answers said it mainly lost scores on problems with complicated descriptions, meaning its main difficulty still lay in comprehension. It "has to understand Chinese well first" in order to improve its math score, said the teacher.
Although the machine failed to achieve the targeted score of 110, the research team still took pride in it.
According to Hu Guoping, president of iFLYTEK Research Institute, it marked the first-ever attempt for any robot to automatically complete test papers without access to the Internet and test banks. While the world-renowned AlphaGo computer program is focused more on computing intelligence, AI-MATHS addresses issues in recognition intelligence, a field where there remains a big gap between artificial intelligence and humans.
Researchers believe AI-MATHS will improve its future performance through more training and studies.
