The MANIAC Quotes

“Lost faith is worse than no faith at all, because it leaves behind a gaping hole, much like the hollow that the Spirit left when it abandoned this accursed world. But by their very nature, those god-shaped voids demand to be filled with something as precious as that which was lost. The choice of that something—if indeed it is a choice at all—rules the destiny of men.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“He once told me that, just as wild animals play when they are young in preparation for lethal circumstances arising later in their lives, mathematics may be, to a large extent, nothing but a strange and wonderful collection of games, an enterprise whose real purpose, beyond any one stated outright, is to slowly work changes in the individual and collective human psyche, as a way to prepare us for a future that nobody can imagine.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“The present awful possibilities of nuclear warfare may give way to others even more dreadful. Literally and figuratively, we are running out of room. At long last, we begin to feel the effects of the finite, actual size of the Earth in a critical way. This is the maturing crisis of technology. In the years between now and the beginning of the next century, the global crisis will probably develop far beyond all earlier patterns. When or how it will end—or to what state of affairs it will yield—nobody can say. It is a very small comfort to think that the interests of humanity might one day change, the present curiosity in science may cease, and entirely different things may occupy the human mind. Technology, after all, is a human excretion, and should not be considered as something Other. It is a part of us, just like the web is part of the spider. However, it seems that the ever-accelerating progress of technology gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity, a tipping point in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them cannot continue. Progress will become incomprehensibly rapid and complicated. Technological power as such is always an ambivalent achievement, and science is neutral all through, providing only means of control applicable to any purpose, and indifferent to all. It is not the particularly perverse destructiveness of one specific invention that creates danger. The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“Ehrenfest sought relentlessly what he called der springende Punkt, the leaping point, the heart of the matter, as for him deriving a result by logical means was never enough: “That is like dancing on one leg,” he would say, “when the essence lies in recognizing connections, meanings and associations in every direction.” For Ehrenfest, true understanding was a full-body experience, something that involved your entire being, not just your mind or reason.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“He was almost consumed by his passion for logic, and during his entire life, that strange gift of his let him see things with remarkable clarity, granting him a vision so blinding that to others, whose focus is smeared by emotional considerations and prejudices, his point of view seemed completely incomprehensible.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“we don’t know what comes after evil, do we? And sometimes the deadliest things, those that hold enough power to destroy us, can become, given time, the instruments of our salvation.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“Gödel had shown him that if someone succeeded in creating a formal system of axioms that was free of all internal paradoxes and contradictions, it would always be incomplete, because it would contain truths and statements that—while being undeniably true—could never be proven within the laws of that system.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“They had already put together an entire committee to choose the best targets, but it was actually von Neumann who convinced them that they shouldn’t detonate the devices at ground level, but higher up in the atmosphere, since that way the blast wave would cause incomparably larger damage. He even calculated the optimal height himself—six hundred meters, about two thousand feet. And that is exactly how high our bombs were when they exploded above the roofs of those quaint wooden houses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“Significant phrases, witty points and dialectic are all at his disposal in an extraordinary manner. He knows how to make the most difficult things concrete and intuitively clear.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“The philosophical implications of Gödel’s logic were astonishing, and his incompleteness theorems, as they later came to be known, are now considered a fundamental discovery, one that hints at the limits of human understanding.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“He lamented the attitude of his younger students, who “no longer noticed that their heads had been turned into relays in a telephone network for communicating and distributing sensational physics messages” without realizing that, like almost all modern developments, mathematics was hostile to life: “It is inhuman, like every truly diabolic machine, and it kills everyone whose spinal marrow isn’t conditioned to fit the movement of its wheels.” His already excruciating self-criticism and inferiority complex became truly unbearable, for although he knew mathematics, it was not simple for him. He was not a computer.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“one of the essential insights gained by Turing as he observed his “children” was that if machines were ever to advance toward true intelligence, they would have to be fallible: they would need to be capable not only of error and of deviation from their original programming but also of random and even nonsensical behavior. Turing believed that such randomness would play an important part in intelligent machinery, because it allows for novel and unpredictable responses, creating a large variety of possibilities among which a search program could then find the appropriate action for each particular circumstance.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“His answer to the nuclear dilemma was a perfect reflection of the best and the worst in him: mercilessly logical, completely counterintuitive, and so utterly rational that it bordered on the psychopathic. The thing about my husband that people don’t understand is that he truly saw life as a game, he regarded all human endeavors, no matter how deadly or serious, in that spirit. He once told me that, just as wild animals play when they are young in preparation for lethal circumstances arising later in their lives, mathematics may be, to a large extent, nothing but a strange and wonderful collection of games, an enterprise whose real purpose, beyond any one stated outright, is to slowly work changes in the individual and collective human psyche, as a way to prepare us for a future that nobody can imagine. The problem with those games, the many terrible games that spring forth from humanity’s unbridled imagination, is that when they are played in the real world—whose rules and true purpose are known only to God—we come face-to-face with dangers that we may not have the knowledge or the wisdom to overcome.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“he confessed that he could not understand how he had learned to ride a bicycle—a veritable feat of balance, equilibrium, and coordinated motor function—without once having had to use his reason. How could his body think by itself? How could it figure out the complicated motions that it had to execute so as not to fall flat on his face? These simple activities, in which you actually had to stop thinking to fully accomplish them, would fascinate him for his entire life, and even though he loved sports when he was a boy, he avoided all forms of physical exertion when he became a man.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“Technology, after all, is a human excretion, and should not be considered as something Other.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“With the creation of the atom bomb physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” That’s what Oppenheimer said.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“The idea that everything in the world has a meaning is, after all, precisely analogous to the principle that everything has a cause, on which the whole of science rests.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“For Ehrenfest, true understanding was a full-body experience, something that involved your entire being, not just your mind or reason.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“You don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in, you know?”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“I now shudder at the accuracy of some of his prognoses, prophecies that no doubt came from his incredible capacity to process information and to sift the sand of the present through the currents of history. That gave him a certain sense of security, an overconfidence that would no doubt have betrayed a lesser man.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“The combination of those two systems—honed and perfected during millions and millions of games of self-play—is what allowed AlphaGo to range far beyond human knowledge and come up with radical strategies and counterintuitive moves like the one that it had flaunted during the second game against Lee Sedol. They also allowed it to have a precise estimate of how unlikely that particular move would seem to its human opponent.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“Egyszer láttam (Neumann Jánost), amint két könyvet vitt a vécére, nehogy az elsőt túl hamar fejezze be, amikor még nincs készen.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“I failed him, failed him miserably in what is most important: I was unable to communicate the sanctity, the holiness of our discipline. I did not teach him what the “pure” in “pure mathematics” really means. It is not what people think. It is not knowledge for its own sake. It is not a search for patterns, nor is it a series of abstract, intellectual games completely unconnected from the real world and its many troubles. It is something quite other. Mathematics is the closest we can come to the mind of Hashem. And so, it should be practiced with reverence, because it has true power, a power that can be easily used for evil, as it is born from a faculty that only we possess, and that the Lord, blessed be He, gave us instead of teeth, claws, or talons, but that is equally dangerous and lethal.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“I told him that it was better to lose an idea than to lose his life, but he looked at me in a way that made it clear that he saw it the other way round.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“It is inhuman, like every truly diabolic machine, and it kills everyone whose spinal marrow isn’t conditioned to fit the movement of its wheels.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“I asked him how he thought to bring together his ideas on computation, self-replicating machines, and cellular automata with his newfound interest in the brain and the mechanism of thought, and his reply has lingered with me for decades, and still comes back to haunt me whenever some casual occurrence brings his detested name to memory. “Cavemen created the gods,” he said. “I see no reason why we shouldn’t do the same.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“You could tell the quality of his thinking by what he chose to ask (questions being the true measure of a man), and after I successfully explained my thesis on symbiogenesis, we began conversing more openly and freely, and I got the chance to peer inside his head. He asked me if I’d heard of Turing’s oracle machines. In time, I have come to regard that simple question as a test. Luckily for me, I knew that Turing had written about oracle machines in his PhD thesis when he was just twenty-six years old: these were regular computers that worked, like all modern devices, following a precise set of sequential instructions. But Turing knew—from his study of Gödel and the halting problem—that all such devices would suffer from inescapable limitations, and that many problems would forever remain beyond their ability to solve. That weakness tortured the grandfather of computers: Turing longed for something different, a machine that could look beyond logic and behave in a manner more akin to humans, who possess not only intelligence but also intuition. So he dreamed up a computer capable of taking the machine equivalent of a wild guess: just like the Sibyl in her ecstatic drunkenness, his device would, at a certain point in its operations, make a nondeterministic leap.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“Because I can’t help but recognize that Johnny—who proved the theorem at the heart of our work—was profoundly pessimistic, his vision of human beings was grim and cynical, and so his mind may have unwittingly tainted the equations that upheld our thinking with its own dark tinge. I myself suffer from a morbid sense of despair, and even now, decades after I worked with von Neumann, I still find 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.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“Speak the truth, write with clarity, and defend it to your very end”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“he wanted to create a new mind, a smarter, faster, stranger one than any we had known. AGI: artificial general intelligence. The true son of man.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC