Name: The Maniac
SKU: 55543247
Price: 746.00 TWD
Availability: InStock
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)
Author: Benjamín Labatut
ISBN: 9781805330677

Type

Physical Book

Author

Benjamín Labatut

Publisher

Pushkin Press

Year

2023

Language

English

Pages

368

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

23x15 cm

ISBN13

9781805330677

The Maniac

Benjamín Labatut (Author) · Pushkin Press · Paperback

1 review

New Book Imported to Taiwan

Delivery: 02 Oct - 12 Oct

NT$ 746

NT$ 746

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Synopsis "The Maniac "

Named a Top 10 Best Book of 2023 by Publishers Weekly a national bestseller a New York Times Editor's Choice pick

“A contemporary writer of thrilling originality . . . The MANIAC is a work of dark, eerie and singular beauty.” —The Washington Post

“Darkly absorbing . . . A brooding, heady narrative that is addictively interesting.” —Wall Street Journal

From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI

Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.

A prodigy whose gifts terrified the people around him, John von Neumann transformed every field he touched, inventing game theory and the first programable computer, and pioneering AI, digital life, and cellular automata. Through a chorus of family members, friends, colleagues, and rivals, Labatut shows us the evolution of a mind unmatched and of a body of work that has unmoored the world in its wake.

The MANIAC places von Neumann at the center of a literary triptych that begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and 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, an encounter embodying the central question of von Neumann's most ambitious unfinished project: the creation of a self-reproducing machine, an intelligence able to evolve beyond human understanding or control.

A work of beauty and fabulous momentum, The MANIAC confronts us with the deepest questions we face as a species.

Benjamín Labatut

(Author)

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He is a Chilean author born in the Netherlands in 1980. He grew up in The Hague before settling in Chile, where he lives and works. He is the author of Antarctica Starts Here (2009), a collection of stories; After the Light (2016), a series of scientific, philosophical, and historical notes on emptiness; The Stone of Madness (2021), a diptych on madness, chaos, and modernity; and When We Cease to Understand the World (2021), a book that explores the ecstasy and agony of scientific advancements and has been translated into more than thirty languages.

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