James Kaimakamis

“The combination of those two systems—honed and perfected during millions and millions of games of self-play—is what allowed AlphaGo to range far beyond human knowledge and come up with radical strategies and counterintuitive moves like the one that it had flaunted during the second game against Lee Sedol. They also allowed it to have a precise estimate of how unlikely that particular move would seem to its human opponent.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“I now shudder at the accuracy of some of his prognoses, prophecies that no doubt came from his incredible capacity to process information and to sift the sand of the present through the currents of history. That gave him a certain sense of security, an overconfidence that would no doubt have betrayed a lesser man.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The Maniac

“He once told me that, just as wild animals play when they are young in preparation for lethal circumstances arising later in their lives, mathematics may be, to a large extent, nothing but a strange and wonderful collection of games, an enterprise whose real purpose, beyond any one stated outright, is to slowly work changes in the individual and collective human psyche, as a way to prepare us for a future that nobody can imagine.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“Looking at the waves scudding outwards and getting lost on the horizon, he could not help but recall the words of his mentor, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had once told him that a part of eternity lies in reach of those capable of staring, unblinking, at the sea’s deranging expanses.”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World