Slovakia Today, English Language Current Affairs Programme from Slovak Radio

If you were offered a chance to travel to the surface of the planet Mars, would you go? What if they told you that you could never come back? This is exactly the decision that a few people will be making sometime in the next 15-20 years, according to Jiří Šilha, a researcher in the Division of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Bratislava's Comenius University. Jonathan spoke with him about this – as well as about the current mission of NASA's Perseverance Rover, which is now on the surface of Mars investigating, among other things, how humans might be able to survive on that planet in the future. –– Repeat: In 2016, the Artificial Intelligence programme AlphaGo, having learnt and developed its own strategies for playing the board game "Go", defeated one of the top Go players in the world in a highly publicized match. The programme was developed by Google's Deep Mind AI laboratory, where Slovak scientist Michal Valko now works in Paris. Jonathan speaks with Michal about AlphaGo and its successor programmes, in which Michal has been able to pursue his goal of developing AI software which is able to learn more and more on its own, with less and less human intervention.