DeepMind taught an AI to take a school maths exam – but it failed

Maths exam

No calculators allowed

Thomas LENNE/Alamy

Artificial intelligence firm DeepMind has tackled games like Go and Starcraft, but now it is turning its attention to more sober affairs: how to solve school-level maths problems.

Researchers at the company tasked an AI with teaching itself to solve arithmetic, algebra, probability and other problems. It didn’t do a very good job: when the neural network was tested on a maths exam taken by 16-year-olds in the UK, they got just 14 out of 40 questions correct, or the equivalent of an E grade.

There were also strange quirks in the …

source: newscientist.com