A new artificial intelligence system can solve SAT geometry questions as well as the average American 11th-grade student.
This system, called GeoS, uses a combination of computer vision to interpret diagrams, natural language processing to read and understand text, and a geometric solver to achieve 49 percent accuracy on official SAT test questions.
If these results were extrapolated to the entire Math SAT test, the computer roughly achieved an SAT score of 500 (out of 800), the average test score for 2015.
Researchers from Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) and the University of Washington computer science and engineering department shared a paper on the findings at the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) in Lisbon, Portugal.
How Geos Works
To achieve the results, GeoS solved unaltered SAT questions that it had never seen before and that required an understanding of:
- Implicit relationships
- Ambiguous references
- The relationships between diagrams and natural-language text
“Unlike the Turing Test, standardized tests such as the SAT provide us today with a way to measure a machine’s ability to reason and to compare its abilities with that of a human,” says Oren Etzioni, CEO of AI2.
“Much of what we understand from text and graphics is not explicitly stated, and requires far more knowledge than we appreciate. Creating a system to be able to successfully take these tests is challenging, and we are proud to achieve these unprecedented results.”
