The MANIAC

ISBN:
978-0-593-65447-7
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4 stars (3 reviews)

A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.

The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann’s most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond …

1 edition

Biografía interesante se convierte en crónica deportiva coñazo

3 stars

La biografía de John von Neumann contada a través de parientes, amigos y colaboradores sirve de coartada para hacer un repaso por los grandes genios de la física y las matemáticas de las primeras décadas del siglo XX, para continuar por los primeros computadores.

La primera mitad de MANIAC me ha encantado, sobre todo la parte en que cuenta los intentos de encontrar una teoría formal para las matemáticas, hasta que Gödel lo tiró todo por los suelos. Me recuerdó mucho mis sufrimientos en los primeros años de la carrera.

Luego la cosa se tuerce un poco hacia el misticismo ghost in the machine que, la verdad, veo de poca aplicación a los primitivos ordenadores de los años 40, para culminar en una descripción de la agonía de von Neumann que se hace un tanto insufrible. Pero lo peor es el tercio final del libro: una crónica periodístico-deportiva del enfrentamiento …

The MANIAC - reflections on humanity, technology, and intelligence

5 stars

Really enjoyed it. It covers the life of John von Neumann through the imagined voices of different people (family, friends, scientists) who know him through his life. It's ostensibly a true story but put through the fictional narration of diverse voices. But it's not simply a biography; it's more a reflection on what it means to be human, what is human intelligence, and the consequences of rapid technological change brought about by human intelligence, leading up to the creation of machine intelligence..

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5 stars