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"To get anywhere, or even live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer."
- Robert Heinlein

Smart Dust  
  Very tiny computers.  

Lem imagines that computers can be no larger than tiny grains of sand; a desert becomes a massively parallel-processing computer system.

"The desert on our planet is in reality no desert, but a Gigagnostotron, in other words a good 10^9 times more powerful than this primitive device of yours. Our ancestors created it for the simple reason that anything else would have been too easy for them; in their megalomania they thought to make the very sand beneath their feet intelligent..."
Technovelgy from The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age, by Stanislaw Lem.
Published by Harcourt Brace in 1965
Additional resources -

Compare to the ultraminiature spy circuit from The Unknown by Christoper Anvil and wildcode from The Fractal Prince (2012) by Hannu Rajaniemi.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age
  More Ideas and Technology by Stanislaw Lem
  Tech news articles related to The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age
  Tech news articles related to works by Stanislaw Lem

Smart Dust-related news articles:
  - Millimeter-Scale Computing For 'Internet of Things'
  - IBM's Grain Of Sand Computer

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