New ways to multiply 3 x 3-matrices

Abstract

It is known since the 1970s that no more than 23 multiplications are required for computing the product of two 3 x 3-matrices. It is not known whether this can also be done with fewer multiplications. However, there are several mutually inequivalent ways of doing the job with 23 multiplications. In this article, we extend this list considerably by providing more than 13 000 new and mutually inequivalent schemes for multiplying 3 x 3-matrices using 23 multiplications. Moreover, we show that the set of all these schemes is a manifold of dimension at least 17.