Books: The Maniac By Benjamín Labatut

  (Drivebycuriosity) - John von Neumann was a genius. He was described as the individual who had birthed the modern computer, laid down the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics and written the equations for the implosion of the atomic bomb. 

The Chilenian author Benjamín Labatut wrote a kind of biographic novel about him: "The Maniac" ( amazon). According to the author von Neumann "fathered the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, heralded the arrival of digital life, self-reproducing machines, artificial intelligence, and the technological singularity, and promised them godlike control over the Earth’s climate".

Labatut structured his plot in several paragraphs, allegedly told by contemporaries of the genius and fictionalized contributions by people who knew von Neumann, including his wife, his mother and his youngest brother. This creates a lot repetitions and redundancies.  

 

                Learning From Mistakes

But there are strong parts. For instance Labatut describes the roots of AI - by depicting a chess playing software: “Learning from its mistakes through trial and error, it became better and better, stronger and stronger, no longer trying to mimic and play like a human being, but focused only on besting itself. Throughout millions of games it made billions of tiny adjustments to its mathematical model, improving for reasons that no human being could ever really understand, as the inner functioning of an artificial neural network is almost completely opaque to us, for we cannot keep track of or tally the countless effects that arise from the almost innumerable tweaks that the algorithm makes to its inner parameters while slowly building toward its desired outcome".

According to Labatutt AI doesn`t rely on creativity or imagination, but selects the best moves through sheer number-crunching and raw computing power.

I like the chapter about how von Neumann & Co. created the atom bomb in the remote deserts of Alamo - even though that was often told. There is also a chapter how software beat champions in Go, I don´t what was the connection with von Neumann.  

Resume: The Maniac is an interesting literary project and narrates many fascinating episodes of the evolution of science in the first half of the last century. But the elaborated and fractioned structure is filled with too many redundancies.