To multiply two numbers by hand takes a few steps but it's something we're taught in school. When dealing with big numbers, really big numbers, we need to a quicker way to do things.

The way you learned to multiply works, but computers employ a faster algorithm.

To help you understand the algorithm, the video shows a simple two-digit by two-digit multiplication. You can see that the first and last digits are essentially the result of one multiplication.

The algorithm is able to re-discover older matrix multiplication algorithms and improve upon its own to discover newer and faster algorithms. “AlphaTensor is the first AI system for discovering novel, ...

Those algorithms run up to 20% faster than existing matrix multiplication methods, according to the Alphabet unit.

By transforming operands into a Montgomery domain, these algorithms enable efficient modular multiplication and exponentiation, which are crucial for public-key cryptosystems.

A new research paper titled “Discovering faster matrix multiplication algorithms with reinforcement learning” was published by researchers at DeepMind. “Here we report a deep reinforcement learning ...