The Google-Facebook rivalry is intensifying. As the social media behemoth, for instance, reached 1.56 billion users, it is threatening to overtake Google as the most profitable Internet company when it posted a whopping $5 billion fourth-quarter profit, the Daily Mail reported. Now, an ancient game is fuelling the competition further as the two tech giants try to prove which A.I. could beat human players faster at the Chinese game of Go.

Both Google and Facebook announced this week that they have developed their respective algorithms designed to perform at extremely high levels of competition, according to Popular Science. Google's champion is the A.I. Deep Mind, while Facebook is betting on its AI Research lab.

At this stage, Google is enjoying a slight advantage in the competition after one of its computers called AlphaGo beat the present European Go champion, Fan Hui. The details of Google's quest to master Go through its neural networks and tree search services were published in the January edition of the journal Nature. Facebook, on the other hand, managed a third placement in a monthly bot tournament organized by the KGS Go Server.

Both Google and Facebook's A.I. accomplishments in the area of the Go game could have passed by without most people knowing. However, the two companies are not content until the world notices their progress. Facebook's top honcho Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday that the A.I. they are developing can already keep up with human players in his personal Facebook account. The announcement stole some thunder from DeepMind's progress, which Google revealed one day later.