Google AI computer beats human champion of complex Go boardgame

Fan Hui, three-time champion of the east Asian board game, lost to DeepMind's program AlphaGo in five straight games

When Gary Kasparov lost to chess computer Deep Blue in 1997, IBM marked a milestone in the history of artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, in a research paper released in Nature, Google earned its own position in the history books, with the announcement that its subsidiary DeepMind has built a system capable of beating the best human players in the world at the east Asian board game Go.

Go, a game that involves placing black or white tiles on a 19x19 board and trying to remove your opponents', is far more difficult for a computer to master than a game such as chess.