Few company chairmen could justify taking a 10- hour flight to travel 5,638 miles to watch a board game being played. But Eric Schmidt could.

The Alphabet chairman last week took the trip from Google’s holding company’s headquarters in California to Seoul, South Korea, to watch world Go champion Lee Se-dol go head to head with AlphaGo, an algorithm created by Google-owned British artificial intelligence company DeepMind, over five rounds of the ancient east Asian board game.

“When I was a young computer scientist in the Seventies, there were many claims that we would beat human intelligence. None of it happened,” Schmidt said over a gourmet Chinese meal a few hours before the first Go game. “Now there is a sense that AI [artificial intelligence] has finally arrived.”