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Comment by spaznode | Hacker News Reader

Forgive my ignorance, but does anyone know any real world examples where something like this might improve a certain type of work?

I'm sort of fuzzily half-assedly thinking this might be applicable to image - and by extension video - work but maybe that's not the case at all. I want to be more excited, please enlighten me. :)

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You are probably about as excited about this as people in the 20s and 30s were about quantum theory. "Immediate practical impact" is not how one qualifies research, at least not from my perspective.

That's a perfectly good response. Just wanted to know if this was a "people quietly shuffling and re-implementing some core algo" kind of announcement or more general scientific theory.

So, thank you. By all means keep researching and advancing.

Faster matrix multiplication in general is an important applied topic, because it can speed up all sorts of scientific, engineering, and ML algorithms that have it as a step (often one of the bottleneck steps). However this new technique appears to be more of theoretical interest because of how impossibly large the matrices would have to be before it becomes faster than simpler techniques.

The Strassen algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strassen_algorithm) is used in practice though, and is faster than the naive multiplication approach for moderately large matrices, so this kind of research sometimes produces practical speedups. Not in this case without significant further breakthroughs to really bring down the size of matrices that it wins on, though.

Finite Element Analysis. Maybe. In theory. There are lots of very large square matrices used in the various problems solved by the method. The limit of the technique is generally computing time, although last I worked in the field (about 10 years ago), we were using way, way smaller matrices than are being discussed here, and I don't recall how often the limiting factor was multiplying two of them together. (The usual case is a simple {x} = [M] * {v}).

But I always wondered what FEA would look like if we removed the constraint of model size and computing power.

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