(File photo)

The world champion of the ancient board game Go, South Korean Lee Sedol, expects to prevail in a match with Google's computer program AlphaGo next month, according to a report by Yonhap News Agency Monday.

The report said that each round of the five matches applying Chinese Go rules will take two hours and the match will be broadcasted on YouTube in Korean and English.

According to Demis Hassabis, CEO of AlphaGo developer Google DeepMind, for his company, winning the match isn’t the most important thing. The USD 1 million prize pool that Google has put up for the match will be donated to Go and STEM charities, and UNICEF, if DeepMind wins.

In October 2015, the company’s program AlphaGo already achieved a historic milestone, beating Fan Hui, the highest-ranking European player of the game, 5–0. It was the first time a computer had ever beaten a professional Go player in an even match.

But Hui is ranked around 800th in the world before AlphaGo, and is a two dan player (his rank on the “dan” scale of professional players, which starts at one and rises to nine). Lee, by contrast, is a nine dan player, with the second highest number of international titles the game has ever seen.

The first of the five matches will be played at 1 p.m. Seoul time (4 a.m. GMT) on March 9, 2016, with the rest following on March 10, 12, 13 and 15.

Hassabis was only prepared to rate AlphaGo’s chance of winning at “around 50 per cent”.