以When We Cease to Understand the World入圍國際布克獎的智利作家班傑明‧拉巴圖，用小說形式，爬梳這位被認為是天才的數學家─「電腦之父」約翰尼‧馮‧紐曼(Johnny von Neumann)充滿曲折的一生。 約翰尼是來自匈牙利猶太裔的數學家，二戰時期為躲避納粹迫害猶太人而逃出匈牙利來到美國，他和愛因斯坦同為普林斯頓高等研究院，最初的創始四位教授之一，以過人的記性和驚人的高速計算能力，特別是對理論計算機概論和現代電腦的原型設計聞名，也是他提出著名的「賽局理論」。他也曾參與發明原子彈的「曼哈頓計畫」，二戰後為美國原子能委員會的成員。在他晚期的研究裡，他特別關注人腦與電腦的運作方式差異，也是首個意識到人工智慧將會在未來大放異彩的科學家。 From the author of When We Cease to Understand the World: a dazzling, propulsive novel about the disruptive chaos lurking in the development of computing and AI Johnny von Neumann was an enigma. As a young man, he stunned those around him with his monomaniacal pursuit of the unshakeable foundations of mathematics. But when his faith in this all-encompassing system crumbled, he began to put his prodigious intellect to use for those in power. As he designed unfathomable computer systems and aided the development of the atomic bomb, his work pushed increasingly into areas that were beyond human comprehension and control - and that threatened human destruction. In The MANIAC, Benjamín Labatut braids fact with fiction in a scintillating journey to the very fringes of rational thought, right to the point where it tips over into chaos. Stretching back to early twentieth-century conflict over contradictions in physics and up to advances in artificial intelligence that outpace the human, this is a mind-bending story of the mad dreams of reason.