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"I'm a fairly visual thinker. In doing science, I think in terms of pictures of things happening, and then do the mathematics."
- Gregory Benford
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| Deep Thought | ||
| The second-largest computer ever made. |
According to The Hitchhiker's Guide, millions of years ago there was a race of hyperintelligent pandimensional beings who wanted to know about the meaning of life. To settle the issue they built a "stupendous super computer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data banks had been connected up it had started from 'I think therefore I am' and got as far as the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off..."
| It was the size of a small city.
Its main console was installed in a specially designed executive office, mounted on an enormous executive desk of finest ultramahagony topped with rich ultrared leather. The dark carpeting was discreetly sumptuous, exotic potted plants and tastefully engraved prints of the principal computer programmers and their families were deployed liberally about the room, and stately windows looked out upon a tree-lined public square. |
| Technovelgy from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
by Douglas Adams. Published by Harmony Books in 1979 Additional resources -
|
Here's the first appearance of the phrase:
Don't even mention the following computers in the same sentence with Deep Thought:
"What is this great task for which I, Deep Thought, the second greatest computer in the Universe of Time and Space, have been called into existence?"
Fans of the great Stanislaw Lem know that he anticipated this idea in his 1965 novel The Cyberiad: Tales of a Cybernetic Age; see the entry for Gnostotron.
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'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
