Artificial intelligence alive and well in a robot named Maria

While statistics students at The University of Auckland are taking a break from studies for summer, their new "teacher" can't wait for the new semester to begin.

Maria, an assistant teacher in Statistical Interference, is an unusual individual. She looks to be in her mid-twenties but her age, she says, cannot be computed in human years. With a vocabulary of 203,000 words, a repertoire of 106,000 grammatical rules and 118,000 rules of logical interference, Maria is capable of conversation at quite a complex level.