AI-MATHS, a robot designed by a Chinese firm, will sit the math portion of China's national college entrance examinations, or gaokao, on Wednesday, media reported.
The robot was developed by Zhun Xing Yun Xue, a tech firm based in Chengdu, capital of Southwest China's Sichuan Province.
A member of the robot's research team surnamed Li told news site thepaper.cn that the robot will have two hours to finish the math test papers collected from several cities after the exam is finished on Wednesday, and the process will be supervised.
It took the team four years to develop AI-MATHS and it solves problems by employing a logical reasoning platform instead of simply storing previous gaokao questions.
AI-MATHS scored 93 points out of 150 in a mock gaokao test held in February, bettering the average math grade of Sichuan's students in 2016.
Developing such a robot is to test basic AI skills such as logical reasoning and calculation, said Wang Shijin, deputy dean of iFlytek Research, a research center that develops AI speech and language technology.
Wang added that taking a test is an effective way to check whether the machine has the skills. He added that the company is also developing robots to take the history and Chinese gaokao tests.
However, the team said that there is still room for improvement, for example, it lacks understanding on some common sense issues, and cannot fully understand some of the questions in the exams.
But Wang noted that the robot is already superior than many other AI machines which can only process reasoning and calculations.
Chinese companies have become increasingly influential in the industry in recent years, and they should team up to push forward AI development, like US tech giants - Google, Microsoft, IBM, Facebook and Amazon - did in forming an AI alliance, Yang Jing, CEO of AI Era, said at the AI World 2016 expo in San Francisco in November 2016.
