[LINK] Global brain

[Peter Batchelor]

9 billion names of God

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-link@www.anu.edu.au [mailto:owner-link@www.anu.edu.au]On
Behalf Of Dr. Bob Jansen
Sent: Friday, June 23, 2000 10:52 AM
To: link@www.anu.edu.au
Subject: Re: [LINK] Global brain


At 10:11 +1000 23/6/00, Fred Pilcher wrote:
>There was a tale called, I think, "The Final Question" written in the '50s
>or '60s, but set about now, in which someone asked the Global Computer
>(which sounded remarkably like the Internet) "Is there God?" After some
>hours the computer responded "Insufficient data for a meaningful answer".

It was by Isaac Azimov I seem to remember. Yes, a very interesting 
tale indeed. The other one I liked was the Monks who were on this 
earth to answer the question "what is the name of God?'. When they 
had found it, life would end. Sure enough, they involved IBM to 
provide a large computer system to go through all permutations of 
letters in their special alphabet. Needless to say, the engineers 
didn't believe this at all and were amused by this attempt ------ 
until the stars starting going out. End of story.

bobj