Japanese artificial intelligence gives up on University of Tokyo admissions exam

By Brad Jones November 16, 2016

nestor ai paying attention artificial intelligence — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Earlier in 2016, an artificial intelligence managed to defeat a highly ranked Go player and earlier in November, the AI’s creators at DeepMind Technologies announced plans to teach it how to play Starcraft II. We are living in an era where synthetic minds can beat us at our own games — but news from Japan suggests that humans can still hold their own in some areas.

Since 2011, Japan’s National Institute of Informatics has been working on an AI, with the end goal of having it pass the entrance exam for the University of Tokyo, according to a report from Engadget. This endeavor, dubbed the Todai Robot Project in reference to a local nickname for the school, has been abandoned.

It turns out that the AI simply cannot meet the exact requirements of the University of Tokyo. The team does not expect to reach their goal of passing the test by March 2022, so the project is being brought to an end.

In 2015, the AI managed a score of 511 out of 950, which was nowhere near the result required to gain admittance. Hopes were high that this year would produce a better outcome, but the score that the AI managed was not much of an improvement.

“AI is not good at answering a type of question that requires the ability to grasp meaning in a broad spectrum,” said team member Noriko Arai, speaking about the project with The Japan Times.

It seems that the AI struggled with understanding the questions being asked, rather than being unable to supply an answer, which may indicate that putting the words and phrases into context was the stumbling block. So chalk one up for the human race — there will be no AI undergraduates at the University of Tokyo this year.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Brad is an English-born writer currently splitting his time between Edinburgh and Pennsylvania. You can find him on Twitter…

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