Essentially a biography of John (Janos, Jancsi) von Neumann, aka the Maniac, although this was also the name of his creation, the successor of the ENIAC: the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer, which was used to build the H-bomb; with a prelude on Paul Ehrenfeld, and a last part on AlphaGo (developed by Demis Hassabis) and Lee Sedol. Von Neumann's biography is told by people who surrounded him. I felt I can recognize the voice, at least the style, of Feynman.
Jancsi was outsmarted by only one person during his entire life. [...] It happened in Königsberg, where he had travelled to attend the second conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences [...] It was September 1930.
[... 24 year-old Austrian Kurt Gödel] How could a statement be considered true if there was no way of proving it? It did not make sense to anyone, except for Janos [...] It was the end of Hilbert's program.
Johnny loved America almost as much as I despised it [...] All that maddening, unthinking optimism, all that cheerful naïveté under which they hid their cruelty [...]Oskar Morgenstern (mathematician, economist, co-author)
[...] a joke Fermi made when someone asked him whether extraterrestrials were real: “Of course they are, and they already live among us. They just call themselves Hungarians.”Julian Bigelow (computer engineer)
The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer ENIAC. World's first digital genral-purpose computer. Used up an entire floor at the Moore School in Philly. Hundred feet long. Ten feet high. Three feet deep. And more than thirty tons. Vacuum tubes, crystal diodes, relays, resistors, and capacitors. With five million hand-soldered. joints. A hundreds twenty degrees in the control room when it was running.p. 159
He knew the real challenge was not building the thing but asking it the right questions in a language intelligible to the machine. And he was the only one who spoke that language [...]Richard Feynman
We christened our machine the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer. MANIAC, for short.
You could tell the quality of his thinking by what he chose to ask (questions being the true measure of a man) [...]Klára Dan
When future historians look back at our time and try to pin down the first glimmer of a true artificial intelligence, they may well find it in a single move during the second game between Lee Sedol and AlphaGo, played on the tenth of March 2016: move 31.One of the Ten Thousand Things