Search results for ""Author Benjamín Labatut""

From the author of When We Cease to Understand the World: a thrilling, kaleidoscopic book about the destructive chaos lurking in the history of computing and AI'Monstrously good... Reads like a dark foundation myth about modern technology but told with the pace of a thriller' Mark HaddonIn a scintillating mix of fact and fiction, The MANIAC tells of the dark foundations of our modern world and the nascent era of AI.At its core is John von Neumann, a titan of science who revolutionised fields from game theory to computer systems and helped develop the atomic bomb. As illness unmoored his mind, his work pushed further into areas beyond human comprehension and control.With dazzling mastery, Benjamín Labatut weaves von Neumann's story together with the crises in physics at the beginning of the twentieth century and humanity's showdown with artificial intelligence a hundred years later. Innovative and disquieting, this book plunges

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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 'Monstrously good... Reads like a dark foundation myth about modern technology but told with the pace of a thriller' Mark Haddon John von Neumann was a titan of science. A Hungarian wunderkind who revolutionized every field he touched, his mathematical powers were so exceptional that Hans Bethe - a Nobel Prize-winning physicist - thought he might represent the next step in human evolution. After seeking the foundations of mathematics during his youth in Germany, von Neumann emigrated to the United States, where he became entangled in the power games of the Cold War; he designed the world's first programmable computer, invented game theory, pioneered AI and digital life, and helped create the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was the darling of the military industrial complex, but when illness unmoored his mind, his work pushed further into areas beyond human comprehension and control. The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych about the dark foundations of our modern world and the nascent era of AI. It begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and close 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. Braiding fact with fiction, Benjamín Labatut takes us on a journey to the frontiers of rational thought, where invention outpaces human understanding and offers godlike power, but takes us to the brink of Armageddon.

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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 AIJohnny 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, Benjamin 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.'Emerging as the most significant South American writer since Borges... there is no one writing like him anywhere in the world' - Telegraph

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When We Cease to Understand the World shows us great minds striking out into dangerous, uncharted terrain. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger: these are among the luminaries into whose troubled minds we are thrust as they grapple with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, they alienate friends and lovers, they descend into isolated states of madness. Some of their discoveries revolutionise our world for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear. With breakneck pace and wondrous detail, Benjamín Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to break open the stories of scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.

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