I subscribe to Austin Kleon’s free Friday newsletter. In a recent edition, he mentioned that a “book about A.I., The MANIAC, is one of the best things I read this year.” With all the hype about artificial intelligence these days, this really got my attention.
This book is a semi-biographical novel about John von Neumann, widely considered to be one of the founding father’s of digital computing. Each chapter is in the first person from the point of view of someone who knew von Neumann well. It is an intriguing picture of an important historical figure. But what really grabbed me was the epilogue. There the author tells the true tale of how the computer program AlphaGo beat a top professional Go player. I play Go and followed that series of matches as it happened. Like most other Go players at the time, I didn’t think there was a chance that the computer would win. Spoiler alert, it did.
This novel is a great introduction to the human side of von Neumann and artificial intelligence. The excellent writing varies from voice to voice, showing Von Neumann to be a flawed and struggling human like the rest of us. When you finish this wonderful novel, I highly recommend reading the biography of the computer by Walter Isaacson called The Innovators.
My rating: 4.5/5
