Note: This is a revised and consolidated version of four posts I wrote last year on Benjamín Labatut’s The MANIAC: 1, 2, 3, 4.
Novel-writing, like playing Go, is
an art of assembly. The novelist compiles and assembles facts and artifacts.
The novel has to be built on strong foundations to produce the proof of
concept. Since it’s not erecting an actual building, it has the luxury to bide
time and cut corners for the stones to connect later on and to conquer more
territory.
Benjamín Labatut’s The MANIAC (Penguin Press, 2023) makes
that art of assembly unusually visible. “Lee or The Delusions of Artificial
Intelligence” was an extended coda to The
MANIAC and a standalone short novel assembled and adapted from news,
interviews, documentary film, live streams of the five Go matches including
the press conferences, comments by Go fans and veteran players on the YouTube
live feeds, illustrated Go match commentaries by veteran players (e.g., Game 3 commentary), science articles, and
articles from peer-reviewed journals about AI mastering the game of Go (e.g., Nature
1, Nature 2, Science, Nature 3).
The word “delusions” in the
section title was prominent in AlphaGo
(2017), a riveting documentary directed by Greg Kohs. The documentary supplied
the narrative structure of this section of the novel. In places, this last
section of The MANIAC was a reshoot
of the documentary. The human interest behind the five Go games—the battle
between a human grandmaster and a super-intelligent machine—could match the
suspense generated in the AlphaGo
documentary, in Kawabata Yasunari’s journalistic account (The Master of Go, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker),
and in the 2025 Netflix feature The
Match (directed by Kim Hyung-joo).
The question of how fiction
assembles reality had already arisen in Labatut’s first book to come out in
English, When We Cease to Understand the
World (2020, translated from
Spanish by Adrian Nathan West). In her review of the book, Ruth Franklin had something to say about
the fictionality of the enterprise.
There is liberation in the vision of fiction’s capabilities that
emerges here—the sheer cunning with which Labatut embellishes and augments
reality, as well as the profound pathos he finds in the stories of these men.
But there is also something questionable, even nightmarish, about it. If
fiction and fact are indistinguishable in any meaningful way, how are we to
find language for those things we know to be true? In the era of fake news,
more and more people feel entitled to “make our own reality,” as Karl Rove put
it. In the current American political climate, even scientific fact—the very
material with which Labatut spins his web—is subject to grossly
counter-rational denial. Is it responsible for a fiction writer, or a writer of
history, to pay so little attention to the line between the two?
The ceaseless arguments about
truth, lies, and fiction were here revived to accommodate the pressures of “the
era of fake news.” Labatut may or may not be concerned about the noise in the
background. He was after a different cloud of doubt in his second book in
English.
Like the first book, The MANIAC
was a warning about the destructive effects of Western scientific thought and
the latter’s propensity to go in directions that annihilate order in the world.
In The MANIAC, the dangers of nuclear physics and artificial
intelligence were brewing behind a backdrop of scientists and mathematicians
literally going insane as they went about their rational work of plumbing the
truths and realities of the universe.
As with When We Cease to Understand the
World, W. G. Sebald is a recognizable guardian angel of this book. Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet was
how he titled the first of
four parts of his prose work Vertigo
(1990, translated by Michael Hulse, 2000). Its opening sentence is: “In mid-May of the
year 1800 Napoleon and a force of 36,000 men crossed the Great St Bernard pass,
an undertaking that had been regarded until that time as next to impossible.” A glance at the contents of The MANIAC reveals three sections with Sebald-inspired titles: “Paul
or The Discovery of the Irrational,” “John or The Mad Dreams of Reason,” and “Lee
or The Delusions of Artificial Intelligence.” The opening sentences of the
first two sections were patterned after this opening move, showing how Sebald remained a guidepost in the novel’s composition, as he had been in
Labatut’s first novel.
One afternoon in the 1840s, as George Boole walked across a field near
Doncaster, a thought flashed into his head that he believed was a religious
vision. Boole suddenly saw how you could use mathematics to unlock the
mysterious processes of human thought.
The Chilean novelist used the same
tricks of the German novelist: extended digressions, serpentine sentences, a
chain of ideas and thoughts delivered in manic pace. For good measure, The MANIAC even contained three black
and white photographs strategically positioned between its discrete parts,
making it a true specimen of photo-embedded fiction.
The same Sebaldian tendency to
recast or gloss over factual information—to fictionalize for aesthetic
purposes—was amply displayed in Labatut’s novel. The first parts of the novel
focused on the mathematician John von Neumann, foregrounding intimations and
presentiments about the harm of AI or AGI (artificial general intelligence).
The narrative followed a Rashōmonesque style of telling: Neumann’s
various acquaintances and family members bore witness about him and the milieu
of his time.
The MANIAC of the title was an
acronym for an actual computer machine, but it was also implied to be Neumann
with his bloated figure and all-caps personality. His photographic memory and
monomaniacal intelligence kept him apart from his peers; his morals were
suspect. His computational abilities were legendary. Neumann’s mathematical
work in game theory and self-replicating machines paved the way for the
development of AI machines.
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. But Janos [Neumann] was many moves ahead; he behaved as if he was
looking back at things that had already happened.
While AI was often
anthropomorphized or personified in this novel (and elsewhere in books and
other media), Neumann was here likened to a computer processor or mental
machine. The novel tended to depersonify him as an inanimate, intelligent
machine: an AI himself.
The Neumann parts of the novel
were almost hagiography, or its inverted sense. They consistently emphasized his outsize influence on the scientific and mathematical problems of his
day and of the current era. The MANIAC
was essentially a long version of When We
Cease to Understand the World: the eco-anxiety in the latter was here
transmuted into other chilling ventures of modern science: nuclear arms race,
H-bomb, supercomputing, AI.
* * *
He [Paul Ehrenfest] would pour out everything he took in, delighting those around him
with fabulous displays of knowledge and his uncanny ability to translate the
most complicated ideas into images and metaphors that anyone could understand,
threading together concepts from disparate fields that he drew from the
ever-growing number of books he fed on with ravenous spongelike intelligence.
Labatut might also be describing how his novels were constructed: a series of
associations nested or threaded together. The fictionalized portraits of
scientists and mathematicians served the greater (or gruesome) purpose of
fiction. To what ends?
In the first novel, “Heisenberg
had glimpsed a dark nucleus at the heart of things.” In the second novel, Ehrenfest's friends (Bohr, Dirac, Pauli, Einstein) admired his intelligence
and his deep or overwhelming “desire to understand, to grasp the core of things”:
Ehrenfest sought relentlessly what he called der springende Punkt, the leaping point, the heart of the matter,
as for him deriving a result by logical means was never enough: “That is like
dancing on one leg,” he would say, “when the essence lies in recognizing
connections, meanings and associations in every direction.”
Labatut's scientists were always
after the elusive kokoro, the heart
of things. In the process of trying to grasp the essence or core of things, a
paradox opened. How, in our sincere desire to understand the world, we cease to
be human. We develop the ineluctable capacity to be cruel to others.
The MANIAC was bedeviled by something
ominous, a specter of evil. Dark forces of history were driving the scientists
on the brink of madness. Nazism, according to Ehrenfest in the novel, was “fueled
... by a dark, unconscious impulse that was driving us to a future where our
species would have no place, substituted, sooner than later, by something
completely monstrous.” That monstrous entity was the architects of the Holocaust and their blind followers. But the novelist was also hinting at a far future
menace. AI.
Below is a lateral reading of a passage from the novel
and a book on Neumann.
|
Labatut,
The MANIAC
|
William
Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma: John
von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb (1993, p. 66, as
quoted in musings and
rough drafts)
|
|
How
could such a little country [Hungary]—surrounded as it was by enemies on all
sides and torn between rival empires—produce so many extraordinary scientists
in so little time?... He believed that our country’s outstanding intellectual
achievements were not a product of history or chance, or any kind of
government initiative, but due to something stranger and more fundamental: a
pressure on the whole society of that part of Central Europe, a subconscious
feeling of extreme insecurity in individuals, and the necessity of either
producing the unusual or facing extinction.
|
Stanislaw
Ulam recalled that when Von Neumann was asked about this “statistically
unlikely” Hungarian phenomenon, Von Neumann “would say that it was a
coincidence of some cultural factors which he could not make precise: an
external pressure on the whole society of this part of Central Europe, a
subconscious feeling of extreme insecurity in individual, and the necessity
of producing the unusual or facing extinction.”
|
I’m not sure if Labatut sourced
his information from William Poundstone’s book. The left passage simply
reworded the text found in Poundstone’s Prisoner’s
Dilemma, except that the speaker on the left was Eugene Wigner while the
right was a recollection from Stanislaw Ulam. Nothing earth-shattering so far.
Unless one is doing a dissertation or fiercely interested in the subject
matter, one does not have the luxury of time to closely read the published
biographies and nonfiction—e.g., Turing’s
Cathedral by George Dyson and John
von Neumann by Norman Macrae—to detect the novel’s deviations from factual
information. Contents available online (YouTube) would provide readers a better
idea of how the novelist assembled, fictionalized, and stitched together the
facts he collected on his subjects. That would make for a more accessible
approach to understanding the fictionality of what the novelist called “a work
of fiction based on fact.”
A novel is not fact-checked but
truth-checked. There is a difference.
* * *
Seen from the outside, some stories have
more truth than others, but the truth value of the story does not depend on its
actual truth content. – W. G. Sebald
What matters is whether we want to lie or
to tell and write the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is
the truth. Throughout my life I have always wanted to tell the truth, even
though I now know that it was all a lie. In the end all that matters is the truth-content
of the lie.” – Thomas Bernhard
Type “John von Neumann” in YouTube
and one of the video clips that pop out is his guesting in a 1950s American TV
show (link). In The
MANIAC, the video clip was described by Klára Dan, Neumann’s second wife.
He [Neumann] had just come home after doing something that was
completely unheard of for him: he had appeared on television. It was one of
those saccharine programs intended for “young adults,” which I’m sure that
nobody ever enjoyed, Youth Wants to Know—it
ran on NBC for almost a decade. Government officials, renowned sportsmen, and
noted scientists were questioned on subjects of current interest by an eager
panel of boys and girls. Johnny was forced to participate as part of a PR
campaign set up by the Atomic Energy Commission, and I almost cried with
laughter when it aired: in his episode, he is surrounded by a huddle of
children dressed in their Sunday best and is interviewed by a chubby blond boy
with a buzz cut and a bolo string tie. No more than sixteen years old and
already a head taller than my husband, that teenager asks him a series of inane
questions—Does the United States have enough educated technicians to operate
all the new technologies that are popping up? Are there are [sic] sufficient scholarships for young
people?—queries that my Johnny answers with such gentle saintlike patience that
you would think he was America’s favorite uncle, all smiles and nods, ambling
about with his head weighed down by a massive microphone hung around his neck,
as they tour an exhibit inside a nuclear power plant, with the program’s
presenter leading him by the arm and pointing out several thick cables on the
floor, so that my spouse, who is moving in his usual distracted manner, won’t
trip over them as he expounds on the inner workings of Geiger counters,
scintillators, and other instruments used to measure radiation, still
completely unaware that his own exposure to that very same energy during the
atomic tests had already cost him his life. That ridiculous little TV program
is the only extant record, the only film of him that exists. How can that be? A
genius lowered to the status of a bumbling tour guide.
In the age of deepfake and
hyperdata, everything was verifiable. Truth was a commodity subject to
evaluation and fact-checking. Was Klára Dan’s opinion of the “saccharine” TV
program Youth Wants to Know her own or was it invented
by Labatut? This question could not be verified unless there was a written
account about Klára’s views about the TV incident. There was an unpublished
autobiography of Klára.
“No more than sixteen years old
and already a head taller than my husband,” said Klára in the novel, but in the
video one could see Neumann was just the same height as, if not a bit taller
than, the boy who asked the question. The taller one was the one behind
Neumann. True or false, invented or not, the passage above was telling us more
about Klára’s state of mind than about her husband’s: her bitterness at the
cause of her husband’s cancer due to radiation exposure.
The method of narrative
appropriation, imputing words to historical characters, was central to the
artifice of fiction and almost always invited questions on authenticity and
ethics. Fiction was aesthetic appropriation and approximation, as Sebald explained.
Thomas Bernhard was more succinct and direct: All that matters is the truth-content of the lie. A novel is not
fact-checked but truth-checked.
For Lisbon-based Bernardo Soares,
assistant bookkeeper and author of “A Factless Autobiography,” entire passages
might contain a few or many lies but still be entirely true. Soares believed in
the necessity of lies. According to him, we lie because we are social animals.
We make use of lies and fiction to promote understanding among
ourselves, something that the truth – personal and incommunicable – could never
accomplish.
Art lies because it is social. And there are two great forms of art:
one that speaks to our deepest soul, the other to our attentive soul. The first
is poetry, the second is the novel. The first begins to lie in its very
structure; the second in its very intention. One purports to give us the truth
through lines that keep strict metres, thus lying against the nature of speech;
the other purports to give us the truth by means of a reality that we all know
never existed.
If they are at all effective, the
truth-content of images in a writing are but a smokescreen of the characters’
inner feelings. They could be evocative because they are accessible by other’s
feelings when faced by the same situation, the same dramatic tension.
* * *
The last section of The MANIAC—the five-match duel between
Lee Sedol, the South Korean grandmaster and world champion of Go, and AlphaGo,
the AI program developed by eventual Nobel Prize laureate Demis Hassabis’s team
at Google DeepMind—was a further invitation to truth-checking in fiction. This
was a standalone section that rivals the suspense in Kawabata’s The Master of Go, the Japanese novelist’s
reportage of a 1938 Go match. Labatut seemed to follow Kawabata’s principle: “Since
I was reporting on a match sponsored by a newspaper, I had to arouse interest.
A certain amount of embroidering was necessary.” Cross-checking Labatut’s “facts”
with the available online materials showed more than “a certain amount” of
embroidery. It was almost a reshoot and re-editing of the documentary
film AlphaGo on which the
Go matches of the whole section were anchored. Labatut’s fictionalized version
of Lee vs AlphaGo was a textual documentary spliced from various tweaks of
facts and truth-contents of lies.
Go was like breathing to him [Lee Sedol], a process that he could not
stop: “I always think about Go. There is a Go board in my head. When I come up
with new strategies, I place stones on the board in my head, even when I drink,
watch dramas, or play billiards.”
The
source of the quote was Lee’s 2013 interview in Korea JoonAng Daily.
I always think about baduk. There is a baduk board in my head. When I
come up with new strategies, I place stones on the board in my head even when I
drink, watch dramas or play billiards.
That was practically verbatim,
with the word “baduk” replaced by “Go.”
In the novel, an anecdote was told
about Lee:
“One time, he and I drank together until two in the morning, but after that he invited me back to his
house, falling down drunk, to go over a game he had just won, and replayed
every stone, white and black,
because even though he had won the match,
he said there was one move—made by
himself!—that he didn’t quite understand,” said Kim Ji-yeong. [emphases
added]
It was basically the same
story—with details added (the ones emphasized above)—from a 2016 article in the same Korean daily:
“One time, he and I drank together until 2 in the morning, but he went
back to a game he had won and repeated every single move because he said there
was one move he didn’t understand,” said Kim Ji-yeong, a Baduk TV anchor.
Lee lost to AlphaGo in the first
three games. Game 4 proved decisive.
[Lee] took longer and longer before each move, cocking his head to one
side, as if listening to a far-off rumble that only he could hear. By move 54,
Lee’s clock had just 51 minutes left, while AlphaGo’s had 1 hour and 28 minutes
of available time. The game inched
forward, and just like before, it looked as if Lee was already on the verge of
defeat; reporters began to crowd outside the playing room as the rumor that the
fourth game would be the shortest of them all began to spread online.
Nevertheless, Lee did not react, and played slowly, cautiously, avoiding direct
confrontation, giving up almost the entire board to his opponent. “Is he not
afraid to die?” Fan Hui wrote in his notes, despairing at Lee’s stubborn
refusal to engage with the computer. Fan was so close to him physically that he
could almost hear Lee’s thoughts and feel what he was waiting for, and soon he
fell into the same trancelike state that had mesmerized the Korean grandmaster.
By move 69, Lee was down to just 34 minutes, while his opponent still had over
1 hour and 18 minutes left. [emphasis added]
Labatut made modifications in his
retelling of the match by compressing the events and paraphrasing the
commentaries. Here’s Fan Hui’s published commentary on Game 4 (pdf):
As the game progressed, it seemed to
everyone that Lee was once again on the verge of defeat.
White played the atari at 56, followed by the hane at 58. When Black
ataried at 59, White had the option of linking up the group on the top. See
diagram 7. Instead, however, Lee chose to pull out his center stone and extend
at 62. With White’s group now isolated and in grave peril, Lee’s heart must
have been overwhelmed with emotions. But perhaps he also sensed the long
awaited moment at hand.
At move 63, Lee Sedol had 42 minutes, AlphaGo 1 hour and 22 minutes.
At this point, people suddenly began to
congregate near the playing room. The rumor was spreading that the game was
about to end, with AlphaGo victorious as expected. But Lee looked cool headed
as ever as he played the turn at 68. Was he really not afraid of dying? [emphases added]
“People” in the commentary became
“reporters” in the novel, giving more specificity and concreteness to the
scene. “Was he really not afraid of dying?” became the more compact “Is he not
afraid to die?” The inspired move that turned things around was move 78. This
was Labatut’s version, evoking Maradona’s controversial goal:
“The hand of God! That is a divine move!” shouted one of Lee Sedol’s
historic rivals, Gu Li, jumping up from his seat in the Chinese webcast. Like a bolt of lightning, Lee’s 78th stone
tore AlphaGo’s position apart, striking at the heart of the board with a
wedge move unlike anything anyone had seen before. People went wild with
excitement. [emphasis added]
This was cribbed from the
commentary, with some variations.
At last, Lee Sedol launched his attack. Like an earthquake, the wedge at 78 tore apart the cracks in Black’s
fortress! None of us had anticipated this. When Gu Li saw White 78 from his
broadcasting studio in China, he shouted: “The divine move!” All of Lee’s
painstaking preparations were finally about to bear fruit. [emphasis added]
Labatut’s version captured the
essence of what went on, replacing the “earthquake” with “bolt of lightning”
and adding to the exclamation of the Chinese commentator Gu Li and other
spectators.
“That would be so cool if it
works,” said Chris Garlock, an American commentator, completely stunned. “That is such an exciting move. It’s going
to change the whole game,” said his colleague at the DeepMind YouTube feed,
Michael Redmond, agog at the potential that Lee Sedol had managed to find
inside his opponent’s dominion, at a place where no other Go player in the
world would have had the audacity to dive in. [emphases added]
In the actual commentary beginning at around 3:10:21,
the sequence of comments made by Michael Redmond and Chris Garlock was
reversed, and their comments were shortened and spliced from what were said in
the YouTube footage. Here’s the actual exchange in the video:
Redmond: This is—. Oh, look at that move. That’s an exciting move. [more comments while demonstrating
scenarios and moves on the Go wall board] It’s going to change the equation in this one. [more comments]
Garlock: Oh that’s gonna change
things.
Redmond: Now black cannot escape.
Garlock: That would be so cool
if it works [more comments]. [emphases added]
The cut made by the novelist
actually followed the one in the documentary film. It’s as if the novel was
fictionally building on the documentary’s editing of reality.
In the novel, AlphaGo was awarded
an honorary 9 dan certificate after Lee left the stage. In the documentary, Lee
was present during the awarding ceremony. Labatut made liberal adjustments to
what was said or what actually occurred in the YouTube videos and other
sources. He merged dialogues from various sources, supplied a précis or a
paraphrase of statements, rearranged the chronology of scenes, shortened or
expanded or rephrased and conflated the conversations made by various
personalities, compressed time, and mis-attributed statements.
To what ends? Were these
deliberate infelicities meant to preserve the momentum of the story and the
human interest? For continuity and dramatic tension?
These novel-writing tics were
hallmarks of the works of Sebald and (to some extent) Kawabata. Both recreated events in a different plane of reality, with the German novelist bending Pepys’s diary entries to fit his own fiction and the Japanese novelist tinkering with facts to add drama to his reportage. To
bravely lie and flout facts: the stuff of true and truthful novels.
Because the truth is incapable of
accomplishing social understanding, “Lying is simply the soul’s ideal language.”
We’re going back to the ideas put forward by Bernardo Soares, assistant
bookkeeper, in The Book of Disquiet.
I’ve lied? No, I’ve understood. That lying, except for the childish and
spontaneous kind that comes from wanting to be dreaming, is merely the
recognition of other people’s real existence and of the need to conform that
existence to our own, which cannot be conformed to theirs. Lying is simply the
soul’s ideal language. Just as we make use of words, which are sounds
articulated in an absurd way, to translate into real language the most private
and subtle shifts of our thoughts and emotions (which words on their own would
never be able to translate), so we make use of lies and fiction to promote
understanding among ourselves, something that the truth – personal and
incommunicable – could never accomplish.
Truth-content is personal, after all, and fiction is a vehicle for lies. The novelist can only get away with the hand of God if he assumes the role of the documentary film editor and director. The hand of God is the novelist’s ultimate wedge strike.
* * *
Annex: Additional examples of Labatut’s source transformations
From Game 4:
When he saw what was happening, Demis Hassabis snuck away from the
players’ room as quietly as he could and ran down the stairs, storming into the
control room just in time to watch the head programmers huddled in front of a
screen, where AlphaGo’s probability of
winning had just fallen off a cliff. “Did anything strange happen before it
started acting this way?” he [Demis] asked them, and when everyone replied
that, just a few moments before Lee Sedol played his wedge move, everything
looked normal—hell, better than normal, AlphaGo had been massacring Lee—they
had nothing else to do but hunker down and try to contain the sinking feeling
in their stomachs, as they realized that their worst fears were now coming
true: AlphaGo had become delusional. [emphases added]
In the documentary (after around 1:07:48 timestamp), Demis made
the remark, “It looks like it has fallen off a cliff.” In reality, it was David
Silver who asked the question made by Demis in the novel. David’s question in
the documentary was incomplete, in fact: “Did anything strange happen in the
[pause]?
“What’s it doing there!” Hassabis screamed as he saw the next move that
the computer was considering.
Demis made a similar remark but he
hardly screamed. The scream was the novelist’s touch, given the tense
circumstances.
At one point Demis commented in
the novel, “It knows it’s made a mistake, but it’s evaluating it the other way.
I mean, look! Look! Lee is confused. He’s like, What’s it doing? That’s
not an I’m scared look, that’s a What
the fuck is it doing? look.”
His actual words in the
documentary were not exactly like that (Labatut added a bit here and there) but
essentially the same. However, Demis did not utter the fuck word in the documentary. The novelist did. The latter was
heightening the frustration of the AI creator about the defeat of AI at the
hands of a mortal in a game the machine had supposedly mastered.
In another live feed commentary,
Kim Myungwan asked a question (at timestamp 1:59:36): “What’s going on?” The same scene
was incorporated in the documentary (1:09:13) but was followed by the remarks
Andrew (Myungwan’s partner commentator) made earlier (1:58:00 in the Myungwan commentary). The
documentary spliced together the conversations in the Myungwan commentary live
feed, maximizing the power of editing afforded this art form. In the novel,
Myungwan’s question at 1:59:36 also appeared. It was followed by Andrew’s
responses spliced from Myungwan commentary at 1:47:12 and 1:48:12 and combined in the documentary at 1:07:35. The novel made a different response
to the question but followed the liberties made by the documentary in
re-sequencing the events.
At the blunder made by AlphaGo,
the novel quoted a female host from a live broadcast of a South Korean TV
station.
“Oh, that is ridiculous!” shouted
the female host of one of seven South Korean TV stations that were
broadcasting the match live. “Is it a mouse mis-click from Aja Huang? No,
that’s the move. These are not human moves. It’s inexplicable. Those are
mistakes, clear mistakes. For the first time in four matches, we have seen
AlphaGo make mistakes. I think Lee Sedol found a chink in its armor. He found
the weakness in the system,” she added as
everyone watched the champion stare at the board, clearly as confused as
everyone else. It took AlphaGo more than twenty moves to recover its sanity,
but by then it had completely lost control of the game. [emphases added]
The quotes were attributed to the
female host. In reality, she only uttered the first exclamation (1:09:47 in the documentary). The rest of the
statement followed in the documentary but these were not made by the host. They
were spliced from statements of the other commentators: Myung-wan, Andrew, and
the American commentators Garlock and Redmond. (I was not able to verify who
made the statement in the above quote.)
From Game 5:
One commentator in the
novel said, “Perhaps this is what 10, or 11, dan play looks like? It [AlphaGo’s
move] looks weird, it looks ugly, it just doesn’t make sense to us.” The
statements were actually made by another person being interviewed in the
documentary. The speaker was different, and the wording was slightly different
in the documentary: “This is what 10 or maybe 11-dan play looks like. It looks
weird, and we don’t quite understand it.”
In the novel, Lee’s statements
during the press conferences following the matches were spliced together from
his actual statements during (a) the press conference, (b) the awards ceremony,
and (c) his sit-down interviews for the documentary. The novelist sometimes
imputed words not said or added flourishes to what were actually uttered. “Mind-blowing
game,” Demis would say in the final press conference. “This is the most
mind-blowing experience of my life,” the novel would say inside quotations.
Garlock made a comment during the press conference that we’ll be talking about
these games for years to come. This will be integrated into Demis’s speech
during the press conference that the games “will be discussed for a very long
time to come.” Demis said in the novel during press conference, “For me it’s
the culmination of a twenty-year dream,” but he actually said this in an
interview (not press conference), saying instead “For us” and not “For me.” Labatut
perhaps used the singular to hark back to the back story on Demis at the
beginning of the novel’s coda.
