bokomslag The MANIAC
Skönlitteratur

The MANIAC

Benjamin Labatut

Inbunden

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  • 368 sidor
  • 2023
From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story of the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, great genius of the 20th century, tracing the influence of his singular legacy on the creation of the modern age.

Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took modern science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.

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—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 human understanding or control.

A word of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC's unique blend of fact and fiction confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.

  • Författare: Benjamin Labatut
  • Illustratör: 3 B&w Interior Images
  • Format: Inbunden
  • ISBN: 9780593654477
  • Språk: Engelska
  • Antal sidor: 368
  • Utgivningsdatum: 2023-10-01
  • Förlag: Penguin Press