Robots are becoming creative now, apparently. 

Vivi is a robot that can write poems so good, experts thought they were written by a human poets.  Vivi is actually created by a team of robot developers from the Center for Speech Language Technologies (ESLT) in Beijing's Tsinghua University. 

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To test Vivi's abilities, 10 of Vivi's poems were pitted against 10 poems written by humans. The judges were 12 experts who studied poems from the Tang Dynasty (618-907), China's golden age of poetry, at the most prestigious Chinese universities.

The panel of judges thought that 31 percent of Vivi's poems were composed by humans. According to ESLT, Vivi passed the Turing test, an evaluation of a machine's capability to display intelligent behavior similar to that of a human. 

In Vivi's 20-character poem titled Chunmei (Early Plum Blossom), a judge noted that despite the robot's use of old-fashioned expressions, its syntax was very well. Another poem titled Jing (Mirror) had sentences that were too "plainly and carelessly" written. 

When it comes to the poems' rhyme, fluency, theme, and meaning, the robot scored 2.72 points out of five, still a lot lower than the average human score of 3.20. 

Wang Qixin, a member of the design team, explained that Vivi is an intelligent program based on "Deep Neural Networks which essentially mimics the workings of the human brain. The robot can also write several kinds of verse from the Song Dynasty (960-1279). 

Wang said that he hopes that people will not compare Vivi to Google DeepMind, an artificial intelligence that recently made waves in the technology sector as it exhibited an exemplary performance on the Chinese traditional game Go. 

TagsRobots, robots in China, robots that can writer poetry, Turing Test, robot passes Turing test, Artificial Intelligence, robotics in China, Internet of Things, Tsinghua University