Hungarian wonderkid, John von Neumann was a titan of science, whose exceptional mathematical powers made Hans Bethe, a Nobel Prize winning physicist into thinking he might represent the next step in human evolution, von Neumann after studying mathematics in Germany emigrated to the United States where he became entangled in the power games of the Cold War. He designed the world’s first programmable computer, invented game theory, pioneered AI and digital life, helped create an atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When his illness unmoored his mind, his work pushed further into areas beyond human comprehension and control. Paul Erenfest, an Austrian physicist and close friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces, it ends a hundred years later, in the show down between the South Korean Go Master, Lee Sedol and the AI program AlphaGo. Benjamin Labatut takes us on the journey to the frontiers of rational thought where invention outpaces human understanding and offers godlike power, but take us to the brink of Armageddon.

This novel imaginatively told through fictionalised personal testimony of von Neumann’s failure to respect the difference between the game-like abstractions of mathematics and the messy seriousness of human life.

Lebatut imagine one Go official’s view on this matter saying ” There’s no point in playing out the endgame if you know you’re going to lose, right? Today when AI is on the cusp of making everyone from coders to truckdrivers obsolete, what is the endgame? If he succeeds at showing how acts of genius might break the world forever. The manic charts the sweep of modern computing, from its first inklings in punched cards used in Jacquard textile looms, to dramatic confrontation between artificial intelligence and acclaimed masters of Chess and Go, Even the most right brained among them will gain insight into the power and potential dangers of AI.

The Manic by Benjamin Labatut,Pushkin Press/ PenguinPress £17.59