‘The MANIAC’ by Benjamin Labatut (2023) – 354 pages
There is little question that John Von Neumann was one of the most intelligent humans of the 20th century. This Hungarian Jewish mathematician, real name Janesi Von Neumann, came up with the idea of stored-programs on a computer in the early 1950s. Up until that point, computers were little more than glorified calculators. The stored-program concept allowed the same computer to be used for millions of different uses which is where we are today. Earlier he was also one of the scientists and mathematicians who worked on the Manhattan Project, the development of the atomic bomb and later the hydrogen bomb. Von Neumann was also a pioneer in artificial intelligence, and his papers on the subject are still read today.
Von Neumann was one of those eccentric genius types who had difficulty tying his shoes.
“We owe so much to him.
‘Cause he didn’t just give us the most important technological breakthrough of the 20th century.
He left us part of his mind.”
First we are with Von Neumann in his birthplace of Hungary. Neumann was one of a group of scientists and mathematicians knows as the Hungarian Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Von Neumann was fortunate to be able to move his family from Hungary to the United States in 1930. In the United States he did all he could to defeat the Nazis.
“It did not help, of course, that soon after he met Godel the Nazis came to power and began to persecute us, but to him that was not really a surprise, only the starkest confirmation of his total disillusionment with human decency and the ultimate proof of the sway that irrationality held over the human race.”
The maniac of the title of this novel is not John Von Neumann as some might be expecting, but instead it is the name given to the first stored-program computer. MANIAC = “Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer”.
“I often wonder if my horrific inferiority complex, which not even the Nobel Prize has diminished in the slightest, is a product of having known Von Neumann for the better part of my life.” Eugene Wigner
Benjamin Labatut’s first novel, ‘When We Cease to Understand’, was a revelation. This fiction describing the minds and lives of some of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century was unique and like nothing I had read before. ‘The Maniac’ is more a continuation of that first book rather than a revelation.
The first 272 pages of ‘The MANIAC’ are pretty much a straight fictionalized biography of Von Neumann. However the last 75 pages of the novel make a sharp turn in another direction. As we mentioned, Von Neumann was a pioneer in artificial intelligence. The oriental game of “Go” is even more complex than Chess. In 2016, South Korean Lee Sedol was the world champion Go player. Starting March 9, 2016, Lee played a five-game match, broadcast live, against the computer program AlphaGo, developed by a London-based artificial intelligence firm Google DeepMind. After Lee Sedol lost three games to the computer, Lee finally won a game.
After defeating another human champion, AlphaGo has developed into an unbeatable force.
Grade: A
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