The way the book starts? Oof, chills. Literal chills.

“On the morning of the twenty-fifth of September 1933, the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest walked into Professor Jan Waterink’s Pedagogical Institute for Afflicted Children in Amsterdam, shot his fifteen-year-old son Vassily in the head, then turned the gun on himself.”

That has to captivate you immediately. It opens on the struggles Ehrenfest faced and what led him to that murder-suicide - a very strong start in my opinion.

Then the book shifts to John von Neumann and his life story. How he was an exemplary kid from the very beginning - extremely sharp, ruthlessly logical in how he approached problems. How he loved playing with the loom his father got him and couldn’t rest until he’d pieced together exactly how the machine worked. We also see how awkward his towering IQ made him, and how he had a way of making everyone around him feel inferior. There’s a section where a professor describes a so-far-unsolved problem he’s working on. Neumann thinks about it for a bit, solves it, and moves on like it’s no big deal. The professor is left stunned and, quite frankly, demoralised.

Then we get to the part where he writes the foundational work on game theory, helps build the atomic bomb, and pioneers the field of artificial intelligence. He becomes so central to US military strategy through his game theory work that he has security clearance for nearly everything, and generals line up to consult him on how the world might play out. He had a knack for that - being a Jew, he’d tracked the Nazi movement in enough detail to stay just long enough and leave early enough to be safe. And the biggest talking point in the whole book, I think, is how shaky Neumann’s moral fibre was. He’s the one who pioneered the idea of mutually assured destruction - that the answer to ending all war is military superiority. He could, in theory, work on something capable of destroying earth and humanity, and have no qualms about it at all.

Finally, we get a glimpse of his struggles outside the world of physics. He never really had a successful relationship - not with his first wife, not with his second - and he had issues with his daughter too. So while we all imagine wanting the kind of intellect we admire in Neumann, we never stop to think about the flip side of that coin.

The second section, like I said, is about how AlphaGo was created and the chatter around it. Everybody assumed the reigning world champion would beat it. He lost - and quite comprehensively. AlphaGo made some baffling moves that conventional wisdom of the game would flag as obviously bad, and only later did people realise how brilliant the strategy actually was. After being utterly defeated, the champion didn’t just lose the game - he lost the morale to ever hope to beat it. That, to me, was the most crucial part: the realisation that the machine has surpassed you so completely you can’t even fathom bridging the gap. The section is very relevant to the whole AI boom now, but as a reader it didn’t impress me as much - it was kind of what I expected going in.