Par Avion

A Claim To Space

London Chris Roles: International Women’s Day highlights injustices that are still based on gender alone. In Tanzania, women cannot legally inherit land from their husbands. This means that widows—particularly older widows living in rural communities—are left at the mercy of sons, nephews and others who have inh­erited land and property, often resulting in cruel and unjust outcomes.

The Daily Telegraph

Playfully Intelligent

Sufflok Norman Sanders: You write that until now, computers could only do what they were programmed to do, and that the AlphaGo computer was not programmed to play the game; it taught itself. But it did not learn to teach itself; it was programmed to do so. Seventy years ago, on the Cambridge University EDSAC computer, we had a game (noughts and crosses) miraculously squeezed into its memory. Today’s machines play and win at both chess and Go, but there is no difference in principle between then and now.

The Times

Dribbling Dreams

Derry Stephen O’Kane: The Chinese president Li Xinping may dream that Ch­ina could one day lift the football World Cup, but with only 33 teams (31 county t­e­ams and teams from New York and London), it might be more realistic  to try for the All-Ireland Gaelic tit­­le. Indeed one player wi­th Chinese links, Jason Sherlock, who has an Irish mother and  father from HK, won the title in 1995.

The Economist