A robot developed by a company in Chengdu, Sichuan province will take the mathematics section of China’s national college entrance exam, also known as the gaokao, on June 7. It will be the first attempt by an AI to tackle the world’s largest-scale exam.

The computer challenger, AI-MATHS, is an artificial intelligence program designed by Chengdu Zhunxing Yunxue Technology using big data and natal language recognition. Though labeled a robot, AI-MATHS is actually an assembly of over 10 servers, which jointly run an artificial intelligence system. According to the company, AI-MATHS will not only take the math exam used in most regions in China, it will also attempt to complete several provincial math tests.

Joining 9.4 million students taking the exam this year, the robot will begin the test after 5 p.m., when the test for students across the nation is already over. Like most students, AI-MATHS has prepared stringently for the gaokao. It completed 500 sets of practical exercises, including around 12,000 questions, said Lin Hui, chief executive of Chengdu Zhunxing Yunxue Technology.

This is not the first time the robot has attempted a math test. In February, it scored 93 out of 150 on a different math exam, a mark only slightly higher than the passing grade of 90. According to Lin, natural language recognition is the robot's biggest obstacle, as it lacks the ability to make lexical inferences.

“The robot cannot deduce the meaning of new words through context. For instance, the abbreviation for tangent can be ‘tan’ and ‘tg,’ but AI-MATHS can only solve problems containing ‘tan,’ as it has never encountered ‘tg’ before,” explained Lin.

Similar robots have previously been developed by researchers from other nations, but the results are not promising. Japanese scientists have abandoned efforts started in 2011 to make a robot that can score high enough on an entrance exam to gain admission to the University of Tokyo.

China has been working hard to develop a high-scoring robot to take on the gaokao. According to Xinhua, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology has announced a plan to develop special gaokao robots. By 2020, the ministry hopes that AI robots will be smart enough to earn scores that would gain them admission to leading universities.