Google Inc.’s artificial intelligence Go player, AlphaGo, last week beat Ke Jie, a Chinese 19-year-old considered to be the world’s best Go player. Now, at the top of its game, AlphaGo is retiring.

Google announced over the weekend that mastering this highly complex 3,000-year-old game was a great achievement, but now it’s time for the same team behind AlphaGo to focus on more pressing matters. The AI was created by the DeepMind Technologies Inc. unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc.

That focus, said Google in a blog post, will be to “help scientists as they tackle some of our most complex problems, such as finding new cures for diseases, dramatically reducing energy consumption, or inventing revolutionary new materials.”

Google also said it will publish a final academic paper detailing the changes it made to its algorithm in the hope that developers will be able to take this knowledge and expand on it. In addition, Google will create a teaching tool that enables people to see how exactly AlphaGo became the best, giving clear insights to the strategies it used. The defeated Ke Jie will collaborate with Google to create the tool.

Following his defeat, Ke came to the conclusion that “the future belongs to AI,” a rather different opinion than he had last year when he claimed AlphaGo would never be able to beat him. Ke was reported as saying, “Last year, I think the way AlphaGo played was pretty close to human beings, but today I think he plays like the God of Go.”

Prior to AlphaGo’s retirement, Ke said he would not play the AI again, admitting that victory was impossible. Perhaps he can take some solace from a tweet by DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, who wrote, “Ke Jie pushed AlphaGo right to the limit.”

The sky is the limit now, according to Google, stating that “AlphaGo is just the beginning.” Its raison d’etre is now being upgraded from playing games to addressing “some of the most important and urgent scientific challenges of our time.”

Image: Google