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"One could imagine a very ascetic sort of life ... where the body is ignored. This is something I've played with in my books, where people hate to be reminded sometimes that they have bodies, they find it very slow and tedious."
- William Gibson
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| Associators | ||
| Computer system finds correlations. |
| How enormous and yet how incomplete that knowledge was, Alvin was slowly learning. In spite of the self-canceling circuits which obliterated all information as soon as it was obsolete, the main registers contained a hundred trillion facts at the smallest estimate. Whether there was any limit to the capacity of the machines Rorden did not know. That knowledge was lost with the secret of their operation.
The Associators were a source of endless wonder to Alvin, who would spend hours setting up questions on their keyboards. It was amusing to discover that people whose names began with “S” had a tendency to live in the eastern part of the city — though the machines hastened to add that the fact had no statistical significance...
“It sounds very simple,” admitted Alvin, "but I don’t think I would have found it in a thousand years. Is that how the Associators work?”
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| Technovelgy from Against the Fall of Night,
by Arthur C. Clarke. Published by Startling Stories in 1948 Additional resources -
|
An opportune warning:
Rorden smiled. “You’ve been letting the Associators do too much thinking for you,” he admonished gently.
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'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
'...the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and Then one toppled and fell. Then another.'
'Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space...'
'The men are dead, but their acquired wisdom lives on and I am the beneficiary.'
'Young people found the driverless car admirable for petting.'
'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
