An artificial intelligence created by the firm DeepMind has discovered a new way to multiply numbers, the first such advance in over 50 years. The find could boost some computation speeds by up to 20 per cent, as a range of software relies on carrying out the task at great scale.
Matrix multiplication – where two grids of numbers are multiplied together – is a fundamental computing task used in virtually all software to some extent, but particularly so in graphics, AI and scientific simulations. Even a small improvement in the efficiency of these algorithms could bring large performance gains, or significant energy savings.