DeepMind's game-playing AI has beaten a 50-year-old record in computer science

"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." Despite the calculation's ubiquity, it is still not well understood. A matrix is simply a grid of numbers, representing anything you want.