He knew the real challenge was not building the thing but asking it the right questions in a language intelligible to the machine. And he was the only one who spoke the language.
We christened our machine the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer.
MANIAC, for short.
On its surface, the title of The MANIAC would appear to refer to the early computer tucked away in the basement of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, but metaphorically, it refers to those geniuses whose ability to see further and understand more deeply than us ordinary humans can appear as a form of madness (or mania) to those around them. Primarily the story of genius polymath John von Neumann — the overwhelming majority of this novel, sandwiched between the stories of Paul Ehrenfest (quantum physicist and friend of Einstein, who literally could not live with understanding reality at the subatomic level) and South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol (whose unrivalled mastery of mankind’s most complicated game was bested by early AI) — this reads like nonfiction, with the stories of these three men straightforwardly related by those around them. I was interested in everything that author Benjamin Labatut compiled here, could understand the warning to humanity that grouping these stories together provides, but something about it didn’t really feel like a novel. Still enjoyed the read and am happy to have picked it up. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
He was a fifty-three-year-old Jewish mathematician who had emigrated from Hungary to America in 1937, and yet at his bedside, hanging on his every word, sat Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission; the Secretary of Defense; the Secretaries of Air, Army, and Navy; and the military Chiefs of Staff — all waiting for a final spark, one more idea from the mind that had birthed the modern computer, laid down the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, written the equations for the implosion of the atomic bomb, 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, now wasting away before their eyes, screaming in agony, lost in delirium, dying, just like any other man.
John von Neumann’s biography is incredible — from his earliest days, his spooky ability to understand and make connections was recognised and encouraged — and for the most part, this is the story of his education and career; from working with Kurt Gödel on the basic truths of mathematics (writing sixty some pages on how we know that 1+1=2, eventually coming to the conclusion that there are no fundamental truths) to his work on the Manhattan Project and early computers (building on Alan Turing’s work to create Artificial Intelligence in the 1950s), von Neumann’s superhuman mental abilities, coupled with obsessive focus, does seem a brand of ‘maniac’. And as I wrote above, we learn von Neumann’s story from those who knew him, from his oldest friend, Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner (‘There are two kinds of people in this world: Jancsi von Neumann and the rest of us’), his first wife Mariette (‘I married Johnny because, idiot that he was, he made me laugh, and we remained in lust during our entire lives’), co-founder of Game Theory Oskar Morgenstern (‘He wasn’t a man who sat down to think, he would be thinking continuously, so that by the time it was ready in his mind, it all came rushing out; infallible, he would dictate these carefully constructed sentences without a moment’s hesitation and making absolutely no mistakes’), Nils Aall Barricelli, whose use of MANIAC to replicate evolution on number sets was adapted by von Neumann, uncredited (‘Ire and fury, bile and hatred for that magpie, that smiling devil of a man’), and his second wife, Klara:
The thing about my husband that people don’t understand is that he truly saw life as a game, he regarded all human endeavors, no matter how deadly or serious, in that spirit. He once told me that, just as wild animals play when they are young in preparation for lethal circumstances arising later in their lives, mathematics may be, to a large extent, nothing but a strange and wonderful collection of games, an enterprise whose real purpose, beyond any one stated outright, is to slowly work changes in the individual and collective human psyche, as a way to prepare us for a future that nobody can imagine.
I do wish I knew what quotes can actually be attributed to their speakers, and which were imagined by Labatut, but I did believe the overall narrative: I believed that the man who advised a first-strike hydrogen bomb attack against the Soviet Union in order to end the Cold War could be the same man calmly accepting the idea of unleashing an uncontrollable self-replicating AI into the universe as a kind of inevitability: the math was written into the foundation of the universe so it will happen. I guess we’re meant to see that, in the first section, Ehrenfest anticipated all of this (to his own detriment), and in the final section, we must recognise that forces unleashed are already beyond human oversight; all because of those maniacs who saw further and understood reality more deeply and have scienced away our future. Again: I really enjoyed what I learned, I think I understand the point, and while I do enjoy reading nonfiction, it’s hard to think of this as a novel.
