The MANIAC

by Benjamín Labatut

have often wondered about the consciousness of animals, how it must be more shadowy than ours, more dreamlike and fleeting, small thoughts like half-burned candles, their outlines never fully formed. And perhaps that is also the case for many of us who must strain to think with clarity. I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue, and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother-in-law, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends, and Albert Einstein was a good friend too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Janos von Neumann. I remarked on this in the presence of those men, several times, and no one ever disputed me. Only he was fully awake.

Go has a strange charm. It takes over your mind, you start to play it in your dreams. It’s always running in the back of your head, whatever else you are doing. The best player at Los Alamos was Oppenheimer, but I got pretty good, pretty quick. Couldn’t beat him, though. I later read that when they dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima, two famous Japanese grandmasters—Hashimoto Utaro, the national champion, and Iwamoto Kaoru, the challenger—were in the third day of a Go tournament, about three miles away from ground zero. The building they were playing in was almost completely destroyed, lots of people were injured, and yet these two guys, these Go masters, came back that very same day, after lunch, and continued to play on till the evening, while women and children were being pulled out from underneath the rubble and the entire city was ablaze. That’s the Japanese for you. And that’s how mesmerizing Go can be. It requires a particular type of intelligence and it’s really intractable to computation, you have to feel your way around the board. It’s spellbinding and unsettling, you cannot simply calculate what the next best move should be.

We were discovering something that not even God had created before us. Because those conditions hadn’t existed elsewhere in the universe; fission is commonplace in the heart of stars or massive celestial engines, but we achieved it inside a little sphere of metal, just a meter and a half in diameter, holding an even tinier core of just six kilograms of plutonium nestled within. It still amazes me that we could do something like that. So it wasn’t just the frantic race to beat the Nazis (and later the Russians, and then the Chinese, and so on and so forth till the world’s end), it was the joy of thinking the unthinkable and doing the impossible, pushing past all human limits by burning Prometheus’s gift to its utmost incandescence.

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 was five times taller than Mount Everest.

Thermonuclear weapons would have been almost impossible to create had it not been for von Neumann’s brainchild. The fate of that machine was tied to them from its inception, because the race to build the bomb was accelerated by Johnny’s desire to build his computer, and the push to build the MANIAC was hastened by the nuclear arms race. It’s scary how science works. Just think about this for a second: the most creative and the most destructive of human inventions arose at exactly the same time. So much of the high-tech world we live in today, with its conquest of space and extraordinary advances in biology and medicine, were spurred on by one man’s monomania and the need to develop electronic computers to calculate whether an H-bomb could be built or not.

I’m not really sure how it ended up in my hands, but what he does in that paper is something extraordinary: he managed to determine the logical rules behind all modes of self-replication, whether biological, mechanical, or digital. It’s so terribly obscure that it’s no wonder it went ignored and unnoticed at first. Or perhaps it is just one of those things that are too alien to be easily recognized, ideas that require science and technology to mature and develop to a point when they can finally fall to Earth and ripen. 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.

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. In science, you normally start from the concrete and then move to the abstract, while here von Neumann laid out the rules, with our DNA being just one particular example of them. So if you were writing a history of ideas, you could definitely say that Watson and Crick’s description of the function of DNA was prefigured by von Neumann, because he had explained it nearly a decade earlier. To me, that certainly qualifies him as a true prophet.

His awful rationale went something like this: if weather was sufficiently understood, and we saw a hurricane heading toward the US coast, we could use a thermonuclear explosion at high altitude to divert its path before it touched land. But that paved the way toward a terrifying scenario, since, as he warned in that very first outline, even the most constructive schemes for climate control would have to be based on insights and techniques that would also lend themselves to forms of warfare as yet unimagined; a weather war that would make Zeus’s lightning bolts seem as innocent and harmless as the projectiles fired by a teenager’s BB gun. My husband believed that whoever understood the weather would gain access to a source of power that exceeded that of the most gargantuan nuclear arsenal, because a single average-sized hurricane delivers more energy than ten thousand atomic bombs.

This approach, in which the computer runs through every single possibility arising from each move, is called, appropriately, brute force. While a human player uses memory, experience, high-level abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, and intuition to cast his or her mind over the board, a chess engine does not really understand the game at all, 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 square, 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.

If one were to consider all theoretically possible games—including ones that would never take place in the real world, since they include completely irrational, fanciful matches—the total number defies comprehension: it exceeds a googolplex, 10(10^100), a figure so large that it is physically impossible to write down in full decimal form because doing so would require more space than is available in the known universe.