Artificial Intelligence Fails Tokyo University Entrance Exams Four Years In A Row

When it comes to information-intensive activities such a taking exams, one could be forgiven for thinking that a robot equipped with artificial intelligence would handily outperform humans. However, in at least one case, it’s clear that AIs have still a long way to go. In Japan, a robot called Torobo-kun has been taking the entrance exam for Tokyo University every year for the last four years and failed every single time. Now, the engineers behind the machine are thinking about having the robot give up and simply find a job.

The team behind Torobo-kun have been working on the project since 2011, trying to get the machine to score high enough in the entrance exam to merit acceptance, The Japan Times reports. The AI started taking the exam in 2013 and has shown progress for every attempt. This time, however, the engineers finally realized that their project was simply not going to work owing to how miserably Torobo-kun failed.

According to Asahi, it would seem that the machine had trouble comprehending some of the questions during the exam, which led to some confusion when it was trying to answer. The exam itself spanned five subjects, which Torobo-kun got 525 out of the total 950 items. That constitutes a 57.1 percent score rate.

Unfortunately, Tokyo University requires at least 80 percent on the exam, and that’s just to enter the liberal arts college. STEM majors would have required scores that the AI would not have been able to achieve.

So, what is next for a machine that couldn’t get into one of the most prestigious universities in Japan? It turns out that it’s the same for every other exam failure.

Moving on from the project, the machine will now be applied to fields that it performed well on, which happened to include history. The hopes of the engineers are to make Torobo-kun invaluable in one or two industries.