AlphaGo, the computer created by DeepMind, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) arm of Google, has a slim chance to win in its Go-chess showdown against the world's top player, Lee Sedol, over five games scheduled to kick off on Wednesday, according to the judgement of Kai-Fu Lee, the former vice president of google.

"I don't think AlphaGo can be the winner facing a Go-chess world champion this time, but it won't be long for the machine to beat human player in the mind sport," said Lee on Tuesday, who had been working as a high-technology executive at Apple, SGI, Microsoft and Google.

"It's a milestone for the development of technology anyway. I'm so surprised to see AI and deep study advance so fast," added Lee, who's one of the most followed micro-bloggers in China, attracting nearly 50 million followers.

"It's just the first try, so I don't bet on AlphaGo wins taking on a world champion. Just like the first-round match between IBM supercomputer 'Deep Blue' and chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1996, Kasparov was the overall winner, but the second round is quite likely to be different."

AlphaGo thrashed European Go champion Fan Hui 5-0 in January -- the first time a computer program has beaten a professional player of the ancient Chinese game, sending shockwaves through the Go community.

Played on a board with a 19x19 grid of black lines, Go is such a complex game that enthusiasts hoped it would be years, or perhaps decades, before machines would be able to triumph over the best human players, but now that time scale is shortening after AlphaGo is scheduled to play Lee.

Lee is a much stronger player than Fan and for now remains confident. "This is the first time that a computer has challenged a top human pro in an even game," Lee said on Feb. 22. "I have heard that Google DeepMind's AI is surprisingly strong and getting stronger, but I am confident that I can win, at least this time."

IBM's Deep Blue lost 4-2 to Gary Kasparov the first time they played in Philadelphia in 1996, but triumphed 3.5-2.5 a year later in New York. Lee may not succumb the first or even the second time, but in the end he or a successor will and another bastion will have fallen.

Go is such a complicated game that until recently the programs could defeat only amateurs and the Google team had to use a new approach. It now looks ahead by playing out the rest of the game in its imagination, many times over.

The program involves two neural networks, software that mimics the structure of the human brain. It was trained by observing millions of games of Go and evolved to predict expert moves 57 percent of the time. The network was then set to play against itself, learning from its victories and losses as it carried out more than a million individual games over the course of a day.