The MANIAC

he was not so much interested in the world as he was invaded by its many forms.

Facing each other, Lee and the computer had managed to stray beyond the limits of Go, casting a new and terrible beauty, a logic more powerful than reason that will send ripples far and wide.

When future historians look back at our time and try to pin down the first glimmer of a true artificial intelligence, they may well find it in a single move during the second game between Lee Sedol and AlphaGo, played on the tenth of March 2016: move 37.

Schools in China, Japan, and Korea have amassed a truly astounding body of wisdom that has been passed down through generations, encoded in a series of swift proverbs that all players know by heart, warnings for avoiding common pitfalls or amateurish mistakes, while trying to whittle down the seemingly endless possibilities that the board offers.

Don’t make empty triangles.

Don’t peep at a cutting point.

Don’t peep at both sides of a bamboo joint.

Even a moron connects against a peep.

Play fast, lose fast.

Don’t play 1, 2, 3—just play 3.

If you don’t understand ladders then don’t play Go.

If you have lost all four corners then you have lost.

If you have secured all four corners then you have lost.

In the corner six stones live but four stones die.

Never try to cut bamboo joints.

Strange things happen at the 1-2 points.

Strike at the waist of the knight’s move.

Learn the eye-stealing tesuji.

The weak carpenter’s square is dead.

Your enemy’s key point is your own key point.

303
Greed cannot prevail!

There is death in the hane.

For centuries, Go was considered an art form more than a game.

And then, at the peak of his career, in early 2016, Lee Sedol was challenged to a five-game matchup against the artificial intelligence system AlphaGo.

I do not think, I play. Go is not a game or a sport, it is an art form. In games like chess or shogi, you start with all the pieces on the board, but in Go, you begin with an empty one, you start with nothing, and then add black and white so that between the two players you create a work of art.

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.

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.

Lectures. He had given me an early draft; in it, he concluded that the brain’s method of operation is fundamentally different from that of the computer. According to my father, all computers follow a similar architecture to the one he created for the MANIAC. It forces them to operate sequentially, a step at a time. But the human brain is very different. It is massively parallel, executing an enormous number of operations simultaneously.

Their entire fraught relationship is painfully documented in the letters that they wrote each other almost daily when they were apart. A large part of their correspondence is erotica, something I dared not even skim over, but the majority is a long recapitulation of their bitter squabbles: “We both have nasty tempers, but let’s quarrel less. I really love you, and, within the limitations of my horrible nature, I do want to make you happy—as nearly as possible, as much of the time as possible,” my father wrote soon after they married.