China’s greatest minds have been developing their skills in the game of Go for over 3,000 years. They have now met their greatest opponent, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo.

Google’s DeepMind, a cutting edge AI research lab, made history when it defeated human professionals at go. At the time the game was considered the ‘holy grail of AI’, and many thought it would take decades for AI to beat a human professional, but in 2015, with AlphaGo, just that happened.

AlphaGo trained on replays of professional Go games, which taught it first to understand how a human plays. Once it had mastered that, it began playing against itself, a learning technique known as reinforcement learning. Eventually the algorithm developed its own unique play style and strategies. Its victory against the pros marked the completion of one of the biggest milestones in the development of artificial intelligence.

This breakthrough was so significant, that movies have already been made about this moment in our history. You can learn more about AlphaGo below, or check out its offspring AlphaZero, a more powerful algorithm trained from scratch with 0 human input.