The MANIAC

by Benjamín Labatut

saw a queen, wearing a gold dress, and her dress was full of eyes, and all the eyes were transparent, like fiery flames and yet like crystals. The crown she wore on her head had as many crowns, one above the other, as there were eyes in her dress. She approached me dreadfully fast and put her foot on my neck, and cried out in a terrible voice: “Do you know who I am?” And I said: “Yes! Long have you caused me pain and woe. You are my soul’s faculty of reason.”

Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,

myself questioning our central tenet: Is there really a rational course of action in every situation? Johnny proved it mathematically beyond a doubt, but only for two players with diametrically opposing goals. So there may be a vital flaw in our reasoning that any keen observer will immediately become aware of; namely, that the minimax theorem that underlies our entire framework presupposes perfectly rational and logical agents, agents who are interested only in winning, agents who pose a perfect understanding of the rules and a total recall of all their past moves, agents who also have a flawless awareness of the possible ramifications of their own actions, and of their opponents’ actions, at every single step of the game. The only person I ever met who was exactly like that was Johnny von Neumann. Normal people are not like that at all. Yes, they lie, they cheat, deceive, connive, and conspire, but they also cooperate, they can sacrifice themselves for others, or simply make decisions on a whim. Men and women follow their guts. They heed hunches and make careless mistakes. Life is so much more than a game. Its full wealth and complexity cannot be captured by equations, no matter how beautiful or perfectly balanced. And human beings are not the perfect poker players that we envisioned. They can be highly irrational, driven and swayed by their emotions, subject to all kinds of contradictions. And while this sparks off the ungovernable chaos that we see all around us, it is...

“Dead Hand”

“Turing machine.”

We christened our machine the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer. MANIAC, for short.

Oppenheimer,

Battle-hardened soldiers who had fought and bled in World War II dropped to their knees and prayed. They sensed that something unspeakably wrong was occurring when they saw their bones appear as shadows through their living flesh. Even those inside were almost blinded by streams of light that shone through the smallest cracks and pinholes in secured doors and hatches. That flash was followed by a tremendous fireball that appeared on the horizon like the sun when half-risen. It quickly expanded into an enormous mushroom-shaped cloud that rose toward the stratosphere and continued to grow until it

that fucking bomb was even a surprise for the president. Eisenhower, newly elected, simply couldn’t believe what he heard when they informed him of the blast in the Pacific. “There is no need for us to build enough destructive power to destroy everything. Complete destruction is the negation of peace,” he said, when it was already too late.

territory while minimizing your opponent’s. Played continuously for over three thousand years, Go is humanity’s