The game was between Lee Se-dol, the world's top Go player, and the computer program.

The computer won.

And to understand why this is significant, you need to understand more about the ambitions of DeepMind, the British company owned by Google.

DeepMind built AlphaGo, the artificially intelligent system that just beat Mr. Se-dol at Go.

The message we want to send with this game, with this AlphaGo system, is how flexible and powerful learning algorithms can be.

So far, computer engineers have been able to built machines that can beat humans at games like chess.

In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue super computer famously beat world champion Garry Kasparov.

With Deep Blue, program was built, a system that was able to analyze every possible outcome of every possible move.

But Go's a much much more complicated game than chess.

There are more possible positions on a Go board than there are atoms in the universe.

This is too much information for even the most powerful super computer to process.

So DeepMind took a different approach:

It created an artificially intelligent system based on neural networks, much like the brain.

It tries to learn and think like people.

In the case of AlphaGo, it's played millions and millions of games against itself, learning from past mistakes and adapting each time.

All of this could have significance to the wider world beyond the Go board.

If DeepMind and other AI experts can create systems that think like us,

it could have truly profound implications on the way we ordinary humans live our lives.

Murad Ahmed, Financial Times.