China’s building an AI robot it thinks can pass the college entrance exam

When China’s high school seniors take the most important test of their lives next year, they’ll be going up against an unexpected competitor: AI.

According to state media Xinhua, the specially-designed AI will take the gaokao – China’s all-important college entrance test – at the same time that real students across the country do in 2017. It’ll need a special proctor to input the questions in digital form, and it will take the Literature/Language, Math, and Culture sections of the test. Its goal is the same as every human student’s: to score high enough to qualify for university.

That’s no small task. The gaokao is notoriously difficult, and scoring a passing grade will require the machine – which is being called the “gaokao robot” – to read and understand questions and prompts, as well as call on outside knowledge and common sense when answering questions. The robot won’t actually be taking the whole test – real students have to face sections on other subjects, including a foreign language – but if it can score well enough to pass muster on the sections it is taking, it will be an impressive accomplishment.

Whatever happens in 2017, the robot isn’t just going to be switched off after the test.

So far, the robot’s best score on a practice test for one section has been 115 (out of 150), but that’s on the mathematics section – arguably the easiest for AI to tackle. Lin Hui, CEO of the Chengdu-based company that’s been tasked with developing the math AI, thinks that by test time next year, the machine could be good enough to test into one of China’s top-tier mathematics or engineering programs (at least in terms of its math score).

The AI competitor has been developed as part of China’s 863 program, a government-funded high tech development initiative that has been in place since the 1980s and is responsible for a lot of the R&D that led to China’s Tianhe supercomputers as well as the Shenzhou series of spacecraft. Projects under 863 can be multidisciplinary and have come out of a variety of government departments, but the gaokao robot project is being run by the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Whatever happens in 2017, the robot isn’t just going to be switched off after the test. It’ll be back to the drawing board in the hopes of meeting the project’s next goal: scoring so well that the AI fully qualifies for admission to Tsinghua and Peking University by 2020.