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senshantoday at 1:43 AM2 repliesview on HN

From "Jokester" by Isaac Asimov 1956:

"Early in the history of Multivac, it had become apparent that there was one big bottleneck: the questioning procedure. Multivac could answer the problems of humanity, all the problems, if -- if it were asked meaningful questions. But as knowledge accumulated at an ever-faster rate, it became ever more difficult to locate those meaningful questions."

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150118004835/http://www.sffaud...


Replies

nine_ktoday at 3:23 AM

I'd say that a more appropriate reference from that time would be "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke [1], which actually deals with the finiteness of the list of problems that a machine successfully exhausts.

[1]: https://hex.ooo/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html

bityardtoday at 3:07 AM

I don't see why that should be a problem, as we already know the answer is 42 in any case.

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