We all knew that artificial intelligence could do things better than normal humans and that was just proven with DeepMind. The company used its boardgame-playing AI, AlphaZero, to beat a 50-year-old math record, in what’s been described as an event.
AI was always going to handle math better than humans but to break such a record has many people shocked. Honestly, we hope there aren’t any other big records broken right now, as human beings still want to feel important.
DeepMind breaks a big record
TechnologyReview claims that the DeepMind AlphaZero AI has managed to solve matrix multiplication quicker than before, breaking an old record. Continuing on, the report says that if an AI can solve a math problem this quickly, it could lead to more advanced computers.
“This is a really amazing result,” says François Le Gall, a mathematician at Nagoya University in Japan, who was not involved in the work. “Matrix multiplication is used everywhere in engineering,” he says. “Anything you want to solve numerically, you typically use matrices.”
Obviously, Matrix multiplication continues to be a complex mathematical equation, and trying to master a faster method can lead to complications. Still, this is a breakthrough for AI and people in this field, so expect more methods like this going forward.
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From board games to math problems
Prior to this, the AlphaZero AI of DeepMind mostly focused on playing board games, so breaking this record is huge. DeepMind actually trained a new version of AlphaZero, called AlphaTensor, and it learned how to do Matrix multiplication.
“We transformed this into a game, our favorite kind of framework,” says Hubert, who was one of the lead researchers on AlphaZero.