What a great start to the new year! This book weaves the facts of John Von Neumann, an Hungarian polymath who "transformed every field he touched", including game theory, the first programmable computer and pioneering AI. Reading of his accomplishments and defeats and their impact on humanity is a fascinating travel through science and its giants. Additionally, the story is told by his family, friends and colleagues, a different way of creating a biography that I enjoyed. The story provided a humanized picture of a brilliant man and the people in his world.
At the end, the book describes the use of the AI ideas Von Neumann engendered to create machines that could beat Karpov at Chess and the Le Sedol, the best player at Go - a harbinger of the future.
Quotes:
[an explanation of how a chess engine works that could be applied to genealogy tree-building]
" it simply uses its power to calculate and then makes a decision following a complex set of hand-crafted rules laid down by its programmers. Each time its opponent places a piece on a black or white the computer constructs a search tree consisting of every possible future arising from that particular configuration of the board; the tree keeps on growing and branching out till it reaches the end of the game and the computer simply selects between its many limbs the outcomes that it considers most advantageous. With each new move comes a different tree, as the game changes and evolves constantly, but with enough power, the computer can look so far into the future as to remain a step, if not several thousand steps, ahead of any human opponent."
Published: 2023 Read: January 2024 Genre: Historical Fiction
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