The MANIAC

This book is well crafted, to the point I had to remind myself several times that its first person accounts weren't real. Labatut turns these historical figures into believable and distinct characters with individual voices.

I learned several things about John von Neumann that I didn't know, and became interested enough to probably read more deeply in the future.

Apart from a few short quotes we don't hear from von Neumann himself in the book, and that choice really helps underscore how impossibly unique he was. Not to mention how strongly others would react to him.

Given some of the marketing around this book, I was a little disappointed to realise that (as far I know) the fiction doesn't venture far beyond historical fact. Based on how it was presented I was expecting the final act to be somehow speculative, based on more of von Neumann's ideas coming to fruition, but that's not what it actually is.

I didn't quite get the Prologue chapters about Go and AI. These are written in a more journalistic style and I couldn't connect them that strongly to the main book. A good piece on its own, but I don't quite understand why it got included here instead of becoming a longform magazine feature or something.

Still, a good read that provides much personal illumination of "the alien" while also reminding us how much of the twentieth century he contributed to.

La biografía de John von Neumann contada a través de parientes, amigos y colaboradores sirve de coartada para hacer un repaso por los grandes genios de la física y las matemáticas de las primeras décadas del siglo XX, para continuar por los primeros computadores.

La primera mitad de MANIAC me ha encantado, sobre todo la parte en que cuenta los intentos de encontrar una teoría formal para las matemáticas, hasta que Gödel lo tiró todo por los suelos. Me recuerdó mucho mis sufrimientos en los primeros años de la carrera.

Luego la cosa se tuerce un poco hacia el misticismo ghost in the machine que, la verdad, veo de poca aplicación a los primitivos ordenadores de los años 40, para culminar en una descripción de la agonía de von Neumann que se hace un tanto insufrible. Pero lo peor es el tercio final del libro: una crónica periodístico-deportiva del enfrentamiento entre ordenadores y hombres en el ajedrez y en go. Se me hizo pesado y sonaba mal, como una traducción apresurada del inglés.