
The MANIAC
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From the author of When We Cease to Understand the World: a dazzling, kaleidoscopic book about the destructive chaos lurking in the history of computing and AI Johnny von Neumann was an enigma. As a young man, he stunned those around him with his monomaniacal pursuit of the unshakeable foundations of mathematics. But when his faith in this all-encompassing system crumbled, he began to put his prodigious intellect to use for those in power. As he designed unfathomable computer systems and aided the development of the atomic bomb, his work pushed increasingly into areas that were beyond human comprehension and control - and that threatened human destruction. In The MANIAC, Benjamín Labatut braids fact with fiction in a scintillating journey to the very fringes of rational thought, right to the point where it tips over into chaos. Stretching back to early twentieth-century conflict over contradictions in physics and up to advances in artificial intelligence that outpace the human, this is a mind-bending story of the mad dreams of reason.
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Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- PAUL or The Discovery of the Irrational
- JOHN or The Mad Dreams of Reason
- PART I: The Limits of Logic
- Eugene Wigner: Only he was fully awake
- Margit Kann von Neumann: Spoiled, savage
- Nicholas Augustus von Neumann: At the head of his horde
- Mariette Kövesi: The devil at your door
- George Pólya: What kind of a boy is this?
- Theodore von Kármán: Some lost their minds
- Gábor Szego: A god-shaped hole
- Eugene Wigner: A mathematician's nightmare
- PART II: The Delicate Balance of Terror
- Richard Feynman: I could see nothing but light
- Klára Dan: A mathematical weapon
- Oskar Morgenstern: A strange angel
- Eugene Wigner: The Hungarian Horsemen of the Apocalypse
- Julian Bigelow: Singed hair and burned whiskers
- Richard Feynman: And then the world catches fire
- PART III: Ghosts in the Machine
- Julian Bigelow: A real mad scientist
- Sydney Brenner: True prophet
- Nils Aall Barricelli: Cavemen created the gods
- Klára Dan: A weather war
- Eugene Wigner: A biological necessity
- Marina von Neumann: What is one plus one?
- Vincent Ford: We heard the machines come alive
- Eugene Wigner: For progress there is no cure
- LEE or The Delusions of Artificial Intelligence
- Prologue
- The Strong Stone
- Brainchild
- AlphaGo
- A Sharp, Sudden Invasion
- A Thing of Beauty, Not of This World
- One of the Ten Thousand Things
- God's Touch
- Game Over
- Calculate, Abandon Instinct
- Epilogue: The God of Go
- Also by Benjamín Labatut
- Copyright
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