The MANIAC

by Benjamín Labatut

intellectual capacities but something rather different, a virtue that is usually lacking among giants: ethics, character, as well as a deep, some would say overwhelming, desire to understand, to grasp the core of things. Ehrenfest sought relentlessly what he called der springende Punkt, the leaping point, the heart of the matter,

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, as well as a description of how to implement those instructions. In his paper, he divided his theoretical construct—which he called the “automaton”—into three components: the functional part, a decoder that reads the instructions and builds the next copy, and a device that takes that information and inserts it into the new machine. The astounding thing is that right there, in that paper written in the late 1940s, he depicts the way in which DNA and RNA work, long before anyone had ever glimpsed the strange beauty of the double helix.