The MANIAC

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From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices comes a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI. Benjamín Labatut electrified a global readership with his previous work, a finalist for the Booker Prize and National Book Award, which explored the lives of mathematicians and physicists who pushed science into strange, sometimes dangerous realms. In this new work, Labatut presents a tour de force on an even grander scale. John von Neumann, a prodigy whose gifts terrified those around him, transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programmable computer, while pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut reveals the evolution of von Neumann's unmatched mind and the profound impact of his work. The narrative unfolds as a literary triptych, beginning with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and friend of Einstein, who fell into despair as science and technology became tyrannical forces. It culminates a century later in the showdown between South Korean Go Master Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo, reflecting von Neumann's ambitious unfinished project: creating a self-reproducing machine capable of evolving beyond human understanding or control. This work confronts us wit