Robot to take gaokao math test

A robot made by a company in the Chengdu Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone will take the math test of the national college entrance examination, commonly known as gaokao, on Wednesday afternoon.

AI-MATHS will sit for the math test after 5 pm, when the test for students in different parts of the country is over, according to Lin Hui, chief executive officer of the company Zhunxingyunxue Technology of Chengdu, which developed the robot.

There is a national, unified paper version of the math test. But different provinces can offer their own versions for students in their provinces, ignoring the unified version.

His company will try to get the national, unified paper version and several other versions, such as the version for students in Beijing, said Lin, adding that AI-MATHS will finish several versions within two hours.

If AI-MATHS is familiar with the questions, it will finish a version within about 20 minutes. If it meets with difficult questions, it will skip them first and return after finishing the easy questions. It will manage to work out the difficult questions or just fail when the test time is over, he said.

AI-MATHS is an artificial intelligence program developed at Tsinghua University in 2014 with cutting-edge technologies of big data, artificial intelligence and natural language recognition.

To the developer of AI-MATHS, the math test it will sit for on Wednesday afternoon is a test of the robot's ability.

The Ministry of Science and Technology has announced a plan to develop gaokao robots. Under the plan, by 2020, artificial intelligence robots will be smart enough to gain admission to leading universities through the entrance exam, Xinhua said.