There was a gentle sea swell, McEwan recalls, as Mitchison held up three hiking boots by their shoestrings and proceeded to give a “remarkable and elegant” lecture on quantum entanglement. “He was a great, playful genius,” says McEwan, who employed Mitchison’s polymathic knowledge in his 2012 spy novel, Sweet Tooth. ( Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert / Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert ) Machines Like Me, by Ian McEwan, Knopf Canada, 352 pages, $32. But before Mitchison died in April 2018, McEwan asked permission to dedicate the book to him. “And we’re very well disposed to treat machines that are even a quarter way human as human.

Source: thestar April 18, 2019 16:52 UTC