Scientists vs. Machines.

Once von Neumann, a Jew, has fled World War II Europe for the U.S., Labatut hastens the narrative toward the locus of so many stories of 20th-century science: the Manhattan Project. The novel's final section, a thrilling human-versus-machine matchup, points to what von Neumann had wrought - and reflects the warnings of Labatut's Wigner. In the early 1950s von Neumann developed his first attempt at such a machine, MANIAC I. A note here about Labatut's technique in crafting this intimate and, of course, subjective fiction: The story is drawn from fact but also engineered to make a case. [Extracted from the article]

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