The historic match between South Korea’s top Go player Lee Se-dol and Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo has drawn worldwide attention, with AlphaGo prevailing in their Go series that concluded earlier this week.

Yet only a few are aware that North Korea used to rule the world stage with its own Go artificial intelligence program despite its short Go history.

Go was introduced to North Korea in the 1960s to the 1970s when Korean residents in Japan “immigrated” to the North on a massive scale, in search of their family roots and the “utopian” socialist life they had been told of in