This book is classified as fiction, but it is based on fact. It is a bit of a weird book, broken up into three parts. It has no storyline, but is more like three potted biographies. The first section is on the Austrian physicist, Paul Ehrenfest. He went crazy and killed his own son, Vassily, who had been living with Down Syndrome, before shooting himself in the head. The ideas of quantum physics were deeply unsettling for Paul. He mused, “Reason is now untethered from all other deeper, more fundamental aspects of our psyche, and I’m afraid it will lead us by the bit, like a drunken mule…. We lie on our knees, praying to the wrong god, a childish deity who hides at the center of a corrupted world that he can neither govern nor understand.” Labatut reports, Paul “tried to calm down and develop his ideas serenely, but his enthusiasm, and the joy of working once more, free from the heavy fog of melancholia, was simply too much for him to contain. It was this work, and this alone, that would tie his name to history; a solution to the irregular and unpredictable behavior of turbulence, a law behind its irreducible randomness.”
The bulk of Labatut’s book is about John von Neumann. Each chapter in this second section is told in the voice of one of his friends or family members. It is a subjective imagining of the facts of Neumann’s life. The first chapter is told by Eugene Wigner. “There are two kinds of people in this world: Jansci von Neumann and the rest of us…. Did I know what went on inside the mind of Janos von Neumann? No, I can’t say that I did…. Jansci was trying to make sense of the world. He was searching for absolute truth, and he really believed that he would find a mathematical basis for reality.” Theodore von Karman expands, “What von Neumann had tried to do was to find the purest and most basic truths of mathematics, and to express them as unquestionable axioms, statements that could not be denied, disproven, or contradicted, certainties that would never fade or become distorted and so would remain—like a deity—timeless, unchangeable, and eternal. On this solid core, mathematicians could then construct all their theories, unfolding the diverse beauty of quantity, structure, space, and change without fear that they might encounter a monster, some awful chimera born of paradox and contradiction that, once awakened, could tear their tidy, ordered cosmos apart.”
Kurt Godel ripped this dream apart. At the Sixth Congress of German Physicists and Mathematicians, according to Neumann, he said, stuttering, “I b-believe that we can p-postulate, within any consistent f-formal system, a statement that is t-true but that can never be pr-proven within the rules of said system.” The remarks were informal so the exact record is lost to time. According to Wigner, “It was the end of Hilbert’s program…. Janos never worked on the foundations of mathematics again. He remained in awe of Godel for the rest of his life.” Neumann, himself, gushed about Godel, “His achievement in modern logic is singular and monumental…. It will never be possible to acquire with mathematical means the certainty that mathematics does not contain contradictions…. Godel is irreplaceable; he is the only mathematician alive about whom I would dare to make this statement.” Wigner concludes, “From Godel onward, I was always afraid of [Neumann], because once he abandoned his juvenile faith in mathematics he became more practical and effective than before, but also dangerous. He was, in a very real sense, set free.”
Later, Wigner summarizes, “I have always resisted condemning Jansci, or judging him too harshly, because I believe that a mind like his—one of inexorable logic—must have made him understand and accept many things that most of us do not even want to acknowledge, and cannot begin to comprehend. He did not see the way the rest of us do, and this colored many of his moral judgments. With his Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, for example, he wasn’t trying to fight a war, or beat the casino, or finally win a game of poker; he was aiming at nothing less than the complete mathematization of human motivation, he was trying to capture some part of mankind’s soul with mathematics.”
Sydney Brenner reveals, “I was part of the group of scientists that discovered the role that messenger RNA plays in all living cells. Essentially, it’s like a minuscule machine that copies information from DNA and then carries it to a structure that uses it to make proteins, the building blocks of life…. I always confess that it came from one of von Neumann’s lesser-known articles, a very short but powerful thought experiment about what it takes to make a self-reproducing machine…. He managed to determine the logical rules behind all modes of self-replication, whether biological, mechanical, or digital…. Von Neumann demonstrates that you need to have a mechanism, not only of copying a being, but of copying the instructions that specify that being. You need both things: to make a copy and to endow it with the instructions needed to build itself…. Right there, in that paper written in the late 1940s, he depicts the way in which DNA and RNA work…. Thanks to him, in modern biology we have this very peculiar situation: its most fundamental and precise mathematical basis was established first, and then we found out how life on Earth had actually gone about implementing it. That’s not the way things go.”
Labatut’s third section is about the Go champion, Lee Sedol, and his battle against AlphaGo, designed by Demis Hassabis’ Deep Mind. Lee, himself, enthuses, “If someone was somehow capable of fully understanding Go, and by that I mean not just the positions of the stones and the way they relate to one another but the hidden, almost imperceptible patterns that lie beneath its ever-changing formations, I believe it would be the same as peering into the mind of God.” Labatut explains, “While the total number of possible chess games is somewhere close to 10^123, which is one followed by a hundred and twenty-three zeros, the number of all possible Go games is almost unimaginably larger: over 10^700 potential games.” Labatut continues, “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 37…. It was unlike anything a computer had ever done before. It was also different from anything that a human being had ever been known to consider. It was something new, a complete break from tradition, a radical departure from thousands of years of accumulated wisdom.” Lee concludes, “I thought I was the best, or at least one of the best. But then this artificial intelligence put the final nail in my coffin. It is simply unbeatable. In that situation, it doesn’t matter how much you try. I don’t see the point. I started playing when I was five. Back then, it was all about courtesy and manners. It was more like learning an art form than a game. As I grew up, Go started to be seen as a mind game, but what I learned was an art. Go is a work of art made by two people. Now it’s totally different. After the advent of AI, the concept of Go itself has changed.”
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