This story begins with a gunshot in the early morning.
And it ends with a machine equipped with real creativity to play against the world Go champion and beat him.
It is disturbing to imagine how a series of automata cross the threshold of the evolutionary process, reproducing and mutating following the laws of natural selection.
All this is what reading
MANIAC
(Anagrama) proposes, a book full of scientific keys.
Its title is due to the acronym of
Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer
, name of the computer based on the architecture developed in 1945 by the mathematician John von Neumann, a man of high IQ and the central character of this book written in a state of thanks for the Chilean Benjamín Labatut.
Among its pages we can find a group of physicists playing at being gods in the Los Alamos desert, blinded by the flash of nuclear tests and ready to open the gates of hell.
In reality, what Labatut does is take us on a journey through the 20th century, from the famous Solvay Conference in 1927, where classical physics was displaced by particle physics, until reaching our days of digits and Artificial intelligence.
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While God plays dice, scientists will play gods
In the end they will achieve it thanks to the great technologies of death.
One of those chosen was John von Neumann, for whom there was no problem, no formula or equation that stood before him.
He was capable of twisting logic until he turned classical axioms around to interpret the keys to the world.
That is what he does when he scrambles Gödel's argument to demonstrate the inconsistency of mathematics.
Let us remember that, for the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel, if a system of axioms is consistent, then it would be incomplete since it would not be possible to demonstrate its truths using said axioms.
And what John von Neumann came to demonstrate was the opposite, that is, that if a system was complete, then it was inconsistent, since it could never be free of contradictions.
In this way, an inconsistent system becomes an unreliable system since it allows you to prove any statement, no matter how crazy it may be, and it also allows you to demonstrate its opposite.
This is just an example of the intellectual caliber of the father of what is now known as Artificial Intelligence, a man who could be a child who has grown very quickly and whose bones suffer when his hands try to touch the foundation of the brain. universe expressed in a beautiful equation.
Because John von Neumann was not satisfied with creating axioms that captured essential truths;
John von Neumann wanted to discover everything that nature had not dared to create.
To find the mathematical root of reality, his dream of reason produced a gigantic monster that fed on punched cards and whose cables emitted a thunderous hum whenever they found a way to incubate organisms within the closed circuits of its body. .
In the same way that the web is an excretion of the spider, for John von Neumann technology was a human excretion, with the difference that the spider will never fall into its own trap.
And that is what Benjamín Labatut's book is about, the human ability to conjure and avoid traps.
That's why it starts with a shot, followed by another.
The shooter is Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest.
He first kills his own son;
The next shot is saved for himself.
The stone ax
It is a section where
Montero Glez
, with a desire for prose, exercises his particular siege on scientific reality to demonstrate that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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