Inside the mind of a machine

Student's artificial intelligence takes on human wordsmiths

Yi Xiaoyuan had never been so "proud and nervous" in his life. On March 24, the 26-year-old computer science student looked on as the machine he had spent two years working on competed in its first "classical poem relay" at the Shanghai Science Hall.

He had come to think of Jiu Ge, the machine, as his "daughter" and was anxious to see how she would perform in front of a hall packed with reporters, professors and students.