Google's AlphaGo artificial intelligence program is retiring from the ancient game following its recent victory over the world's best go player.

Google said it has decided to focus its AI technology on applications such as medical care and energy.

Demis Hassabis, CEO of AlphaGo developer DeepMind, on Saturday said the program will no longer play against humans.

"The research team behind AlphaGo will now throw their energy into the next set of grand challenges, developing advanced general algorithms that could one day 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,"said Hassabis.

The AI program beat Chinese go champion Ke Jie in the last game of a three-game match. It swept all three games.

Google plans to publish one final academic paper later this year that will detail the set of improvements the company made to the algorithms' efficiency and potential to be generalised across a broader set of problems.

Gogole is also working on a teaching tool, which will show AlphaGo's analysis of Go positions, providing an insight into how the program thinks, and hopefully giving all players and fans the opportunity to see the game through the lens of AlphaGo. The first collaborator in this effort will be the Ke Jie, who has agreed to work with us on a study of his match with AlphaGo.