A computer has comprehensively beaten a human champion playing Go, the world’s most complex board game — achieving “a historic milestone in artificial intelligence”, according to Nature, the journal publishing the science behind the feat.

The AlphaGo machine, developed by Demis Hassabis and colleagues at Google’s DeepMind subsidiary in London, triumphed over Fan Hui, the European Go champion, by five games to zero. Jon Diamond, president of the British Go Association, commented: “Before this match I was expecting it to be at least five to 10 years before a program would be able to beat the top human players.”

Of course Google, a company at the forefront of the drive to transform business through AI, is not just playing for fun. “While games are the perfect platform for developing and testing AI algorithms quickly and efficiently, ultimately we want to apply these techniques to important real-world problems,” Mr Hassabis said.