AlphaGo is going out on top. After beating Ke Jie, the world's best player of the ancient Chinese board game Go, for the third time today at the Future of Go Summit in Wuzhen, Google's DeepMind unit announced that it would be the last event match the AI plays. In a statement, DeepMind co-founder and co-CEO Demis Hassabis said the reason was that this week's summit represented "the highest possible pinnacle for AlphaGo as a competitive program." AlphaGo rose to prominence a little over a year ago when it unexpectedly defeated legendary player Lee Se-dol 4-1 in a match held in Seoul. Most computer scientists expected the feat of beating a top Go player with artificial intelligence to be decades away due to the game's complexity and nuance, but with this week's comprehensive defeat of Ke Jie the matter has been settled.

To say that AlphaGo had a great run in the competitive Go scene would be an understatement: it has just defeated the world's number 1 Go player, Ke Jie, in a three-part match. Now that it has nothing left to prove, the AI is hanging up its boots and leaving the world of competitive Go behind. AlphaGo's developers from Google-owned DeepMind will now focus on creating advanced general algorithms to help scientists find elusive cures for diseases, conjure up a way to dramatically reduce energy consumption and invent new revolutionary materials. Before they leave Go behind completely, though, they plan to publish one more paper later this year to reveal how they tweaked the AI to prepare it for the matches against Ke Jie. They're also developing a tool that would show how AlphaGo would respond to a particular situation on the Go board with help from the world's number one player.