Slashdot Mirror
Fujitsu Building Robot To Pass Math Exams
itwbennett writes "Pity those poor Japanese students who attend cram schools, either full time or in addition to their regular schooling, to have a shot at passing the grueling math entrance exams for Tokyo University. If Fujitsu has its way, those students will be upstaged by a robot. The company has set a goal for the year 2021 of building an artificial intelligence robot that can pass the exams."
n/t
Will robots have all the first posts in the future?
I have some bad news for Fujitsi. I had perfect scores for all of my math exams, so at best their robot will be even with me.
Will it be able to cheat? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Wolfram Alpha already knows that level of math.
just reuse last years test and or just have it look up the answer key.
Japan is why to much of a teach the test and it's all about the test and cramming for it.
A software robot that could pass university entrance tests would strike a major emotional chord in the country, where the tests are a major part of society. Most students attend cram schools for years to prepare for the tests, in addition to their normal schools, and often become full time cram-school students if they fail to get into the university of their choice.
Reminds me of an argument I had with an old girlfriend. I don't think much of school - it's just to get a piece of paper to be taken seriously. I guess it "proves" you have the fundamentals.
Old-Girlfriend: It proves that you can apply yourself.
Me: i guess. It also proves you can play the game and follow your porfessor's orders - but don't ever - never - challenge them. (I learned that the hard way.) *silence*
The sex was ... OK. I'm glad she's gone. Body of a swimsuit model, though.
Anyway, if these "AI" (more like an expert system than artificial intelligence) robots can do well an intellignece test and an entrance exam, then I don't think they know what intellgience is - the robot makers or the test examiners. hence, the stereotype of Asians who can't think and create but can only copy and parrot facts.
God! I HATE touch pads and html in a block - combine them and F'nA!
It would have been nice to give a sample problem.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
It strikes a "major emotional chord" if a computer can handle some exam better than students? Does it strike a major emotional chord with a sprinter if a car can beat him in a race?
the students will positively hate that.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
did a better job than the japanese' gods
Show some respect, he's not only a God, he has his own Wikipedia page!
and start creating all these weak-AI that can't do anything important or effective?
Without word problems this is just OCR plus stuff we've been doing for decades. Even with word problems it's not groundbreaking, not since Watson.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Does it work anything like this?
From the headline I assumed that Fijitsu were creating a robot in order to pass their math exams. "What the hell," I figured, "as far as extra credit goes it shows a fairly comprehensive understanding of the subject." But then I thought, "how did Fujitsu collectively fail their math exams?" (Or, if you are the other side of the pond, their maths exams).
Death looks every man in the face. All any man can do is look back and smile. - Marcus Aurelius
Did you translate this from Japanese?
I used to think that software and computers in general would be moving away from typical human interfaces, but I now think that having software/robots perform tasks that humans are also capable of is the future. As a concrete example, I used to think that it would be a bad design to have an application that screen grabs to parse text when it could have the text in a computer readable form, but I see now that a computer that operates a human interface is an advantage. I think that this robot is a step in the direction that we are already heading - our software will augment all of our existing skills - driving, writing, reading, playing games, etc., with a better interface - since it behaves like another human.
What if the test consists in building an AI that can pass the test?
Video of some good progressive thrash music
The project will need to process text and formulas meant for human eyes, extract the math problems and convert them into a form meant for computers
Are they going to have it hold a pencil and flip through the pages of the exam as well?
Robotics wise, this is kinda cute, but not that interesting.
AI wise, yeah, this is pretty interesting, but involves no robots.
Maybe this is all a translation issue. Don't the Japanese differentiate robots from AI?
Even Deep Thought asks them to do his math homework.
Yea, but can will it be able to qualify for a boat loan?
As soon as something like this robot is able to be made, the miniaturized stealth version will no doubt follow. The device would just need a moment of line of sight on the test and could deliver the answers to you, perhaps in morse code skin taps. I suspect there are quite a few people who would love to be able to breeze into an engineering degree, as just one example.
Are you a bot?
Possibly called the "Feeling of power". Wasn't there one where a soldier learnt to do computation in his head (multiplication, etc) rather than use a computer. Seniors couldn't believe it, checked his answers against a computer and they were right. When they started making plans to use human pilots to replace computers in missiles/bombs (a pre-runner of these pilotless drones, I just realized) the original soldier killed himself.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
in other news...
japan to build a better language translating robot.
Will it be able to cheat? :-)
Given that most of the maths department courses where I work ban the use of all electronic calculation devices it will be cheating by taking the exam.
My dog ate my math exam, and later passed it. Thank you! I'm here all week!
The Feeling Of Power
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
All your math exams are belong to us!
Have gnu, will travel.
We already have robots that do math. They're called computers lol. Wouldn't building sexbots be a lot more constructive and profitable? rofl. yes, I know, they're already building those too lol. It was a specific reference :P
The students will only get mad if a factory churns out test-taking robots who take up all the admissions slots.
Computer Does Math, story at 11.
Seriously, I want those 10 seconds of my life spent reading TFS back.
grueling math entrance exams for Tokyo University
FWIW, my impression of those exams was that they are somewhere between 6 and 12 months behind entrance exams to typical west-European universities. Surprisingly little knowledge of linear algebra or statistics is expected, and the calculus is even more formulaic than what one finds in the west. ...which explains why a robot might pass, I guess.
Why don't they build robots that clean up after nuclear disasters? This would be a far greater benefit to Japanese people than robots to cheat in math exams.
kBKbxzAv
I keep skimming that headline, and every time I read it as a robot to foil meth exams.
We have lots of roving gangs of meth cookers who go around doing everything they can to foil the government's attempts to avoid selling them Sudafed. It's a big problem that could get even bigger if this Fujitsu robot really helps them foil meth exams.
Please allow me to be the first to bow to our meth addicted, toothless hillbilly Fujitsu robot overlords.
I want to see the robot write code. Orally or in a typed paragraph give it a set of parameters for a software application and see if it can write one. The ultimate test will be to have it write AI level code.
The day it can do that I would consider it a breakthrough, computers that can write their own software just by telling it what you want to do.
I thought that was what American public schools were for...
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.