The MANIAC

Strange but great book. The Maniac is a work of fiction though interwoven as a story about the life of Von Neumann and eventually a picture of the early development of theories of AI alongside a broader biographical look at the man. I am not sure what I was expecting from this when I bought it as it was more just popping up as a recommendation but I haven't read a book quite like this before. For a while I was unsure of whether what I was reading was actual testimony from people in Von Neumann's life but the author notes that the book is a work of fiction. The Maniac is primarily a biography of John Von Neumann, the Hungarian mathematician/polymath involved in the formalizing of quantum mechanics, game theory, an important participant in the Manhattan project, the designer of the modern computer architecture and early student of self-replicating structures. He was an extraordinary mind that the author describes through a series of fictitious interviews with people in his life. It is an effective buy mystic way to tell the story of his life but such a style was highly engaging. The author weaves in the "perspectives" of several renowned mathematicians and physicists as well as his former spouses. The book describes Von Neumann's astounding genius for being able to solve problems with an unparalleled focus, his breath of expertise coupled to a juvenile maturity on many other matters of day to day living. Among the characters detailed in the book one hears from both Feynman and Wigner (a school friend of Von Neumann who travelled to the US as well with him), Oscar Morgenstern (his game theory co-author). The author gives time to his two wive's perspective (not sure where he got all his sources), which highlight how Von Neumann was in many ways completely incompetent but also unbelievably brilliant, both had significant eccentricities themselves. The book morphs from a description of his unparalleled mathematical abilities to his lack of sympathy or empathy for the consequences for his work. In some sense the author implicitly makes the point the authors theory of zero-sum games comes out in his policy beliefs for things like dropping the bomb. Von Neumann was carried by his goals for finding solutions rather than taking a higher perspective on what he thought about the merit of the rules. The book moves on to computation and weaves in the modern story of Deep Mind and alpha go. It goes back and forth from the story of Von Neumann and how his interests shifted to the biological domain. I never read the Computer and the Brain, but I am assuming the author is weaving a story around this later part of Von Neumanns obsession once computing was getting off the ground. Obviously this field has made enormous leaps in the last decade due to neural networks and the scale of compute and so the author highlights how yet again Von Neumann was way ahead of his time. The story of alpha go and Lee Sedol through his experience is a nice conclusion to the book and one is left with a lot to think about and the new world we are now in where our computing solutions are paralleling tasks we thought solely in the domain for humans. Of course since this book has been published we have only gone further and though one comes to respect the brilliance of Von Neumann, one also hesitates on the idea that such minds should lead people given their lack of human perspective on what objectives serve humanity's interest. This issue is much at the forefront of AI today and in some regards this is the biggest takeaway from the book and the development of the H-bomb a rhyming example of a development that serves no benefit for any person, and yet was developed for its potential to increase power rather than welfare. Highly recommended book, creatively written and served a valuable purpose of entertaining the reader while informing us of what brilliance can deliver and what its blind spots can be.

When I saw that Benjamin Labatut had a new novel, I grabbed for it immediately. His previous effort was called “When we cease to understand the World” and i found it to be one of the best books I have read this century. “The MANIAC” is similar in that it is a fictionalized biography, mainly focused on John von Neumann’s life and career. The title is from the computer that von Neumann designed and had built that was housed at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton shortly after World War II. It was one of the world’s first stored program computers, a notion that Von Neumann developed, perhaps inspired by Alan Turing’s original thesis where he fleshed out what is known as a Universal Turing Machine. Stored program computers are also known as being based on a Von Neumann architecture machines. They are, of course, mainly what the world uses today. A signature achievement from a man acknowledged as a mathematical genius by friends and colleagues, a genuine force of nature, a mathematician’s mathematician. Unfortunately, I am not sure Labatut does justice to the shape of Von Neumann’s extraordinary career in applying mathematics to a dazzling array of problems, from quantum mechanics, to Game theory, to the burgeoning science of computing. Despite the title, he also fails to dive very deep into the workings of the MANIAC itself, and the effort to program it, spearheaded by Von Neumann’s relatively unheralded 2nd wife Klara, who labored in his enormous shadow. In the final section of the book, Labatut tries to make a gigantic leap from von Neumann’s very original mathematical conceptualization of self-replicating machines to more recent advances in Machine Learning that underpin the effort of the Google Deep Mind research team to build a computer program called AlphaGo that successfully challenged the best human players of the ancient Chinese game of Go using Deep Neural networks and reinforcement learning. Tying Von Neumann’s work on self-replicating machines to ML using the neural network approach is a little weak IMHO, however. I see more of a direct line from Von Neumann first to the problem of cracking the genetic code, and from there eventually to the world of Artificial Life and some of the amazing folks associated with the Santa Fe Institute. On the other hand, the lineage of the neural network approach actually runs through McCullough and Pitts, and people like Hebb, that was then taken up again by the parallel distributed processing group at UCSD, following Minsky and Papert’s withering critique of the limited computing capabilities of perceptrons. In summary, this is an excellent and thought-provoking book. But it is a notch or two weaker than its outstanding predecessor, which represents a very difficult act to follow. I should also note that some of the primary sources Labatut cites in his Acknowledgment section are definitely worth pursuing if reading this novel scratches an itch. I am thinking of the George Dyson book, the AlphaGo documentary available on YouTube, the Von Neumann biography, etc.

I can't even describe how much I enjoyed this book. The wordsmithing of the author is so masterful that I read most of the book aloud. Reading aloud brought forward the characters of places and people. It slowed down my brain and defined the pace set by the words used by the author. Sometimes slow and thoughtful, sometimes fast, staccato, excited, angry or tense. I will read this book again, and probably out loud again, because it captures over a hundred years of dramatic history that many have forgotten but is vital to understanding where we are today. Before you begin, understand that it is a novel based on historic events and personalities. It is not a biography. My book club read this book and every member voted it a plus out of ten. A 100% ten plus vote is unusual. One person took the time to google every person mentioned and everyone of them is a historical figure in the world of physics, mathematics and chemistry. The science is real. The locations are real. The majority of the events are real. The author had access to tidbits of letters, news reels, diaries, biographies, textbooks and more. All of the "tidbits" and the history are masterfully woven into the intricate story of late 1800 mathematics, chemistry, and nuclear physics as it evolved up to current history. Without researching every page of the book it is nearly impossible to identify extrapolation from real events. Every advancement has a foundation, a core element of this book. The extrapolated narrative woven around the reality slowly revealed historical figures as people caught in a maelstrom over which they had little to no control and drove their craft forward faster than many imagined is could be. I won't spoil the ending. I kept wondering how the book would end and it ended with a historical game, that I already knew about (and currently a documentary on Netflix). It was the perfect way to morph one historical epoch into the beginning of another. Even if you are not a science or history buff, or like three of my book club members, mathematicians and physicists in your own right, this is a worthy read. For me the hallmark of any good book is that I will read it again and I want to know more of the history. This book did it for me. I hope it will for others. Note: The first chapter is difficult. It deals with personal tragedy. Mental illness. Prepare yourself. The title is a double entendre.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Maniac. It wove two stories into one. The very human story of John Von Neumann and his genius was pared with an explanation of how Von Neumann’s ideas breathed life into artificial intelligence. The author designed this book exceptionally well. It’s a biography inside a novel. Its construction was innovative and gripping. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. But more than anything, it explained two forms of genius. Human and computer based. It helped explain how the world will change because of artificial intelligence. Exciting and frightening all at once.

I bought this after reading "When We Cease to Understand the World," which I gave a solid 5 stars. "MANIAC" is very similar, but it focuses upon John von Neumann, yet another of the most shining lights in 20th century maths and physics, and many of the stellar intellects with whom he interacts over the course of his life. I won't go into the details, but it is incredible to read not just about the depth of his intellect, but also the scope of his interests and how he was able to almost immediately comprehend a problem and solve it. But I give it a weak 5 stars because I think that it becomes redundant in many chapters, particularly those that focus more on the end of his life. I think the book would have been stronger with edits that cut much of the repetition. After reading "When We Cease..." and now this one, I feel tired but not in a good way. Both books are great at giving a gee-whiz feeling to what little science is discussed. They give the impression that madness is the norm rather than the exception for those working at the highest levels of maths and physics, and I just don't think that is the case. And I think that if readers come to these books with absolutely no understanding at all of even the most rudimentary aspects of relativity, quantum physics, and their applications, they will also finish the books with the same blank slate. My suspicion is that, regardless of how interesting the books or how clever they are written, the human subjects of the book are presented as if strange zoo animals are being discussed -- "Look at how amazing they are, and aren't they so very odd!"

As a biographer, Labatut shows some shades of Gleick in terms of historical perspective and level of research. The perspective essays by people close to von Neumann are an interesting storytelling technique. The AlphaGo section is fascinating but bears almost no connection to the meat of the book. Perhaps the point is that van neumann envisioned artificial life. But the deep learning / reinforcement learning networks that power AlphaGo and AlphaZero are not really a von Neumann architecture - rather, the training and inference workloads are a higher level primitive that happens to run on van Neumann machines. Point being - the connection between the meat of the book and the final part is tenuous at best. It’s almost as if it was a separate essay glued to a book about van Neumann. Hence 4 stars.

For me, to read this book was to cross an epoch in my life as a reader. There will always be before I read it and after. I felt that it changed my view of the world: by opening up the obsessions and mentality of John von Neumann so skillfully, it was as if an alien perspective on humanity and history had been disclosed to me, illuminating everything with a fresh light and a cold distance. The book is positively swollen with original substance and style. Despair overtook me upon reaching its end; partly this was a result of despair for the world, careening as it seems to be into an unknown and computationally overpowered future; but also I felt the the simple despair of losing a deeply pleasurable reading experience. I responded to The Maniac as an addict would to the substance of addiction. The subject matter is so fascinating, and the craft of the author is so impressive, and I derived such enjoyment from it, that I not only grew in my understanding of what is possible to achieve with a "good book," but I was positively charged with the need to recreate that experience as soon as possible. The Maniac has left me wondering how I can find a successor. Therefore, in the end, this isn't a review, it's a plea for help. Send reading suggestions!

The novel had some interesting stories and insights. It also was very slow at times. However, my main criticism was that the adjacent chapters were disjointed.