OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. and Japan's National Institute of Informatics (NII) announced today that under NII's "artificial brain" project, known as "Todai Robot Project - Can a Robot Pass the University of Tokyo (Todai) Entrance Exam?," for short, their entry has taken a practice exam held by Yoyogi Seminar - Education Research Institute, a leading Japanese preparatory school.

Under the Todai Robot project, Fujitsu Laboratories has been conducting joint research and participating as the core members of the math team. The overall project, led by NII professor Noriko Arai, commenced in 2011 with the goal of enabling an artificial brain to score high marks on the test administered by the National Center for University Entrance Examinations by 2016 (the "Center Test"), and crossing the threshold required for admission to the University of Tokyo by 2021.

Based upon results of research to date, this year the project took on the challenge of practice exams conducted by Yoyogi Seminar. The math team covered content that could be found on the Center Test (Math IA, Math IIB) and the University of Tokyo entrance exam pre-tests for humanities course and sciences course. For language processing of the text of the exam questions, a certain amount of human intervention was allowed. As for results, the artificial brain of Todai Robot automatically solved two out of four University of Tokyo math questions for humanities course, and two of six math questions for science course. Among all exam takers for humanities and sciences, the results represented a deviation value of approximately 60.

This attempt at an actual practice test serves to evaluate the progress of research results to date, and to identify technical issues to be addressed by future research and development work.

Tokyo Shoseki Co., Ltd. and JC Educational Institute, Inc. kindly provided mathematics problems as part of the mathematics research for Todai Robot project.

Fujitsu Laboratories is involved in the Todai Robot math team, in collaboration with NII, to develop the technologies needed to bring about Fujitsu's vision of a Human Centric Intelligent Society. The goal is to make calculation technology more robust so as to accurately solve a variety of math problems, such as for mathematical analysis and optimization technology, and to automate advanced mathematical analysis for real-world problem solving.

The research initiatives of the math team have been introduced in the collection of papers for the 27th Annual Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, 2013, as "Solving University Entrance Exam Math Problems through the Integration of Deep Language Understanding and Computer Algebra," (Takuya Matsuzaki, Hidenao Iwane, Hirokazu Anai, Akiko Aizawa, and Noriko Arai), and "A Symbolic Approach to University Entrance Examination Problems in Mathematics and Issues Combining with National Language Processing," (Hidenao Iwane, Takuya Matsuzaki, Hirokazu Anai, and Noriko Arai).