How a robot passed China's medical licensing exam

The first time round in a practice run, Xiaoyi barely scored 100 out of a possible 600 points in China's medical licensing exam. It was a disappointing result – the pass mark is 360 – but Xiaoyi then knuckled down, absorbing the contents of dozens of medical textbooks, 2 million medical records, and 400,000 articles to develop the kind of reasoning needed to be a doctor, The Beijing News reported on the weekend. Xiaoyi took the real test in August and, according to the results released earlier this month, romped it in with a score of 456. In doing so, Xiaoyi, meaning "Little Doctor", became the first artificial intelligence robot to pass the exam, taking a fraction of the allowed time to complete the test, according to iFlyTek which developed the machine with Tsinghua University. Wu Ji, deputy director of Tsinghua's electrical engineering department, said the robot could not rely on rote learning to get through the exam.