DeepMind’s game-playing AI has beaten a 50-year-old record in computer scienceThe new version of AlphaZero discovered a faster way to do matrix multiplication, a core problem in computing that affects thousands of everyday computer tasks.“It’s one of the biggest open problems in computer science.”This is because there are more ways to multiply two matrices together than there are atoms in the universe (10 to the power of 33, for some of the cases the researchers looked at).Instead of learning the best series of moves to make in Go or chess, AlphaTensor learned the best series of steps to make when multiplying matrices.“We transformed this into a game, our favorite kind of framework,” says Hubert, who was one of the lead researchers on AlphaZero.The headline result is that AlphaTensor discovered a way to multiply together two four-by-four matrices that is faster than a method devised in 1969 by the German mathematician Volker Strassen, which nobody had been able to improve on since."