I am writing these words – you may be reading them – on a programmable computer. The ubiquity of such devices has helped us to forget how strange, how alien, they are. Stranger still that humans, beings of brains and blood, should ever have conceived of artificial entities. Benjamín Labatut’s magnificent fourth book, neither quite fiction nor wholly fact, addresses what’s most unsettling about these machines. The Maniac has three parts, a “literary triptych”, spanning nearly a century and each named for a genius: Paul Ehrenfest, John von Neumann and Lee Sedol. The first part, Paul, is short but shocking: on September 25 1933, the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest walks into the Pedagogical Institute for Afflicted Children in Amsterdam, shoots his 15-year-old son, Vassily, in the head, then turns the gun on himself.…