"Does it open a new horizon for my thinking? Does it lead me to think new kinds of thoughts, that I would not otherwise perhaps have thought at all? These qualities are what [make] science fiction ...unique."
- Frederik Pohl

Director Jason Dill explained the rationale behind the construction of Vulcan 3:

"But who would watch the Guardians? How could we be sure this supranational body would be free of the hate and bias, the animal passions that had set man against man throughout the centuries?

...There was one answer. For years we had been using computers, giant constructs put together by the labor and talent of hundreds of trained experts, built to exact standards. Machines were free of the poisoning bias of self-interest and feeling that gnawed at man; they were capable of performing the objective calculations that for man would remain only an ideal, never a reality."

The games Machine from AE van Vogt's World of Null-A is a clear predecessor to the Vulcan 3 computer. Enjoy comparing Vulcan 3 to other computers large enough to run whole planets or societies: see the City Fathers from James Blish's Cities in Flight, Watchdog from Jack Haldeman's story of the same name, and Deep Thought from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

See also the way computers design computers in Isaac Asimov's 1958 short story The Feeling of Power and the synthetic intellect from The Machine That Thought (1939) by William Callahan.