London: Google says that it has purchased the British startup ‘Deep Mind’, an artificial intelligence company.

The owner of the company is a 37-year old former chess prodigy who is also a computer game designer.

The American tech giant’s London office confirmed that they have made a deal with Deep Mind. But they refused to disclose the purchase price, which is reported to be $500 million. The company was said to have founded by researcher Demis Hassabis together with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman.

Artificial intelligence is used by computers for tasks which normally require human intelligence, like speech recognition, language translation etc. Deep Mind has pointed out that the company, based in London, has been specializing in algorithms as well as machine learning.

Google, like other tech giants such as Facebook, are in a set out to develop systems that work similar to the human brain.