(ECSN) -- A robot created at China's prestigious Tsinghua University has composed poetry good enough to deceive 12 experts into believing the creative works were those of a human.
The robot Vivi (Weiwei in Chinese pronounciation), produced by the Center for Speech and Language Technologies (CSLT) at the university's Research Institute of Information Technology, is able to write about 25 poems.
Vivi has passed the Turing test, in this case an assessment by 12 experts who study poems from the Tang Dynasty (618-907) at top Chinese think-tank the Academy of Social Sciences.
The Turing test is an assessment, developed by Alan Turing, of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.
In the test, 10 poems by Vivi and 10 by humans were placed together for judges to distinguish. Experts thought 31 percent of Vivi's poems were created by human beings, which means the robot passed the test, according to CSLT.
Wang Qixin, a member of the design team, said the robot can create several kinds of verses, such as those in the form of poems from the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and acrostic ones.
However, further analysis of these poems in terms of rhyme, fluency, theme and meaning saw Vivi score 2.72 points out of five, lower than the human score of 3.20, meaning the robot still has space to outperform humans in creating verses.
In regards to a 20-character poem entitled Chunmei (Early plum blossom), one teacher said the robot used some outdated expressions but the syntax read quite well. Then for another work, entitled Jing (Mirror), the teacher thought some sentences read too plainly and seemed to be carelessly written.
Vivi is actually an intelligent program based on Deep Neural Networks that imitate the workings of the human brain, according to Wang.
Wang added that people should not make comparisons between Vivi and Alphago, a computer program developed by Google DeepMind, because they represent different research directions, with Vivi focuses more on artistic writing.
