Google's artificial intelligence (AI) software will go head-to-head with the world's highest ranked Go player Lee Sedol, the firm has said.

It comes a week after the search giant announced that AlphaGo had beaten French Go champion Fan Hui.

That was seen as a pivotal moment for AI, similar to IBM's Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov at chess.

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Media captionA brief guide to Go
The match will take place in Seoul, South Korea, and will be live-streamed via YouTube.

Demis Hassabis, head of Google's DeepMind lab, announced the news in a tweet.

Image copyright@demishassabis
Mr Sedol said in a statement that although AlphaGo appeared to be a strong player, he was "confident" that he could win the match.

Go is widely regarded as a more complicated game than chess, because of the larger choice of moves, making it a good measure of how AI technology is developing.

Computers have played Go and beaten amateurs but, before Google's victory against the French champion, experts had predicted that it would take another 10 years until a computer could beat the world's best Go professionals.

There has been a long tradition of AI software going head-to-head with human players.

In 1996, IBM's Deep Blue took on chess world champion Garry Kasparov and won, although Mr Kasparov went on to win three and draw two of the following five games.

Then in 2011, IBM's cognitive platform Watson took on the world's best Jeopardy players, a popular American quiz show and scooped the $1m prize.

Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content but was not connected to the internet during the game