Why Does Demis Hassabis Recommend Ender's Game?

David Senra, reading Sebastian Mallaby, says Demis Hassabis told Mallaby to read Ender's Game, one of Hassabis's favorite novels, in order to understand him. Hassabis identified with Ender and wanted the capacity for endurance, and the ability to suffer and still soldier on, visible before their first long conversation.

Partway through doctoral research in neuroscience, Hassabis had already been a chess master, a video game designer, an amateur theoretical physicist, an entrepreneur, a computer scientist, and a five-time world champion when the novel made sense of who he was. Ender is a diminutive boy genius taken from his family to an intergalactic battle school, manipulated by adults, bullied by classmates, and put through extreme mental testing to see whether he could shoulder responsibility for the survival of the human race. Hassabis worked night shifts from 10 in the evening until 4 in the morning on top of normal office hours. Solving humanity's problems and understanding the nature of reality left no time to waste.

Shane Legg, a co-founder of DeepMind, calls an extraordinary level of determination Hassabis's most defining characteristic. Hassabis works, sleeps, eats, and breathes the mission 24 hours a day. Football is the one hobby, as a big fan of Liverpool. Other than that, the mission fills the day.