4 ms·

Nine Billion Names of God

57 points by jcv 15y ago

baddox 15y ago
This story is reminiscent of and inferior to Asimov's "The Last Question": http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
- simonsarris 15y ago
  To me it immediately sprung to mind as almost a combination of The Last Question (about 'the end') and another one of my favorites, The Library of Babel (about permutations) by Borges. http://simonsarris.com/lit/library-of-babel http://simonsarris.com/lit/library-of-babel By this art you may contemplate the variations of the 23 letters...
  - jacques_chester 15y ago
    I've updated my link to point to your copy. Better formatted. Serendipitously I re-read both The Library of Babel and The Lottery of Babylon just yesterday.
    - simonsarris 15y ago
      Oh, thank you. I host several of my favorite short stories merely because the other pages on the internet that host them look as if they were constructed in 1994! Borges and Garcia-Marquez are my favorite authors. There's something about magical realism that is very alluring.
      - jacques_chester 15y ago
        I have to say that I found Garcia-Marquez to be underwhelming. As an author, Borges is like a jeweller -- tiny little works of amazing beauty and perfection.
      - Fargren 15y ago
        Have you given Alejo Carpentier a read? He has a very baroque approach to magical realism that I love.
- cschmidt 15y ago
  Funny, when I read through The Last Question earlier today, I thought of this story as well. The Nine Billion Names of God has always been my favorite sci-fi short story.
- chernevik 15y ago
  Upvote for the Asimov reference, a remarkable depiction of cosmic scale. But they're different stories.
crux 15y ago
You know, when I first read this story years ago, I thought it was great and quite clever. I must confess that rereading it now, it strikes me as really dumb. Not only does Clarke spend the interminable first part of the story in crude exposition—'Surely you mean two!' 'I mean three. But that's not important right now.'—but the very premise of the story—there's these Tibetan monks, who have invented a special alphabet and are writing all the permutations of the name of God in order to bring an end to the universe—is completely at odds with any fact about Buddhism you care to mention. Which is particularly depressing considering that three years after the writing of this story, he would move to, and spend the rest of his life in, one of the most Buddhist countries on Earth. It might seem like I'm nitpicking, but when you have a little story like this whose basically only propositional content is, 'What if a computer made the universe disappear after it completed a mathematically intensive religious task,' the specifics that you overlay become awfully important.
- hartror 15y ago
  I too read this many years ago. I find its impact no less that when I first read it. It is an excellent example of a science fiction short story pithy, well written with a fantastic premise and a great ending. The details of which religion it is don't matter, the impact would be the same if it was the Catholic Church or a some Hindus. The facts may not quite fit but they don't change the story's point. Also the reason Clark put the the discussion of religious doctrine in there is to shift the reader's view point IMO. Make the Lama and his monastery seem a bit silly, especially in the light of the modern world. This makes the impact of the end of the story all that more poignant.
- chc 15y ago
  Talking about "Buddhism" as a homogenous entity is a bit misguided. Sri Lanka is primarily Theravada, while Tibetans practice a religion that is essentially their native shamanism overlaid with some Buddhist ideas. Conflating the two is like looking at a story in which Catholics pray to Mary and saying, "Nonsense! Christians only pray to Jesus. And he should know that, having lived in the largely Christian state of Utah for many years." Catholics are not Mormons, and neither is really representative of Christianity in general. Obviously the story is fiction, but Tibetan Buddhism is steeped in a lot of weird old rituals (not that they're sinister — just ancient and exotic). To me, it seems plausible enough for fiction that there could be some weird offshoot cult in Tibet that believed such a thing.
jacques_chester 15y ago
For a more mind-bending perspective of permutations, look at Jorge Luis Borges. In particular, The Library of Babel[1] and The Lottery of Babylon[2]. These two stories are a bit like HP Lovecraft for mathematicians and computer scientists. What starts with a simple premise turns out to lead to an ever-unfolding sense of dread as the story approaches the consequences of infinity. Babylon deals with probability directly, Babel deals with the concept of permutations. Some people say that Babel is outdated in the modern world but I disagree -- the fundamental problems still exist. The library is a platonic version of the "document-verse", just as the lottery is a platonic version of ordinary life. I thoroughly recommend these stories and all others by the same author to hackers. Be prepared to be deep in thought for some time afterwards. As for Arthur C Clarke, my favourite story of his was The Food of the Gods. Wonderfully paced and very funny. (edit: linked to better-formatted version of Babel) [1] http://simonsarris.com/lit/library-of-babel http://simonsarris.com/lit/library-of-babel [2] http://www.class.uh.edu/mcl/faculty/armstrong/cityofdreams/texts/babylon.html http://www.class.uh.edu/mcl/faculty/armstrong/cityofdreams/t...
- pjscott 15y ago
  I went and read The Library of Babel and was a lot less impressed than I'd expected to be. It describes a library world in which all possible n-character strings from a 22-letter alphabet, for large n, are written in books. This has very low information content -- I could write a program to print the library's contents in a few lines of code -- so I don't see what the big deal is. (I'm using the Kolmogorov complexity definition of information content here, which I think is the most useful.) Any filing system which can precisely specify any given book from the Library must contain within each specification (on average) exactly as much information as a given random sequence of n characters -- the catalog numbers have to be as long as the book itself! Given the Library's preposterously low information content, the characters' fascination with random searching seems kind of ridiculous. On the other hand, I loved The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover, which has some similar themes but is orders of magnitude more mind-bending: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/1/The_Finale_of_the_Ultimate_Meta_Mega_Crossover http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/1/The_Finale_of_the_Ulti...
  - 15y ago
jcromartie 15y ago
Relevant: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/04/may-21-2011-judgment-day_n_804166.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/04/may-21-2011-judgmen...
gojomo 15y ago
In fact, there are only 21 million names, and the monks have secretly tricked crypto-currency enthusiasts into calculating them...
wickedchicken 15y ago
Odd, I actually have this book checked out from the library right now (this story, with others, was bound into a collection sharing the same title). Clarke's brand of science-fiction struck me as much more principled and technically interesting than most of his contemporaries. Most of them have the unique property among science fiction stories of actually being possible given our knowledge of astrophysics. The speed of light is a minor plot element in many, especially the fact that it can't be broken (no 'warp drives'). I don't know if it was Clarke himself who said this, but I recall someone stating that many stories break so many fundamental physical laws that they are more accurately classified as "science fantasy," not science fiction.
zem 15y ago
pretty neat maths problem inherent in the story: https://groups.google.com/group/rec.puzzles/browse_thread/thread/152e83bcefd45865/000214c0f0939a71 https://groups.google.com/group/rec.puzzles/browse_thread/th...

57 points by jcv 15y ago

This story is reminiscent of and inferior to Asimov's "The Last Question": http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

simonsarris 15y ago
To me it immediately sprung to mind as almost a combination of The Last Question (about 'the end') and another one of my favorites, The Library of Babel (about permutations) by Borges. http://simonsarris.com/lit/library-of-babel http://simonsarris.com/lit/library-of-babel By this art you may contemplate the variations of the 23 letters...
- jacques_chester 15y ago
  I've updated my link to point to your copy. Better formatted. Serendipitously I re-read both The Library of Babel and The Lottery of Babylon just yesterday.
  - simonsarris 15y ago
    Oh, thank you. I host several of my favorite short stories merely because the other pages on the internet that host them look as if they were constructed in 1994! Borges and Garcia-Marquez are my favorite authors. There's something about magical realism that is very alluring.
    - jacques_chester 15y ago
      I have to say that I found Garcia-Marquez to be underwhelming. As an author, Borges is like a jeweller -- tiny little works of amazing beauty and perfection.
    - Fargren 15y ago
      Have you given Alejo Carpentier a read? He has a very baroque approach to magical realism that I love.
cschmidt 15y ago
Funny, when I read through The Last Question earlier today, I thought of this story as well. The Nine Billion Names of God has always been my favorite sci-fi short story.
chernevik 15y ago
Upvote for the Asimov reference, a remarkable depiction of cosmic scale. But they're different stories.

crux 15y ago

You know, when I first read this story years ago, I thought it was great and quite clever. I must confess that rereading it now, it strikes me as really dumb. Not only does Clarke spend the interminable first part of the story in crude exposition—'Surely you mean two!' 'I mean three. But that's not important right now.'—but the very premise of the story—there's these Tibetan monks, who have invented a special alphabet and are writing all the permutations of the name of God in order to bring an end to the universe—is completely at odds with any fact about Buddhism you care to mention. Which is particularly depressing considering that three years after the writing of this story, he would move to, and spend the rest of his life in, one of the most Buddhist countries on Earth. It might seem like I'm nitpicking, but when you have a little story like this whose basically only propositional content is, 'What if a computer made the universe disappear after it completed a mathematically intensive religious task,' the specifics that you overlay become awfully important.

hartror 15y ago
I too read this many years ago. I find its impact no less that when I first read it. It is an excellent example of a science fiction short story pithy, well written with a fantastic premise and a great ending. The details of which religion it is don't matter, the impact would be the same if it was the Catholic Church or a some Hindus. The facts may not quite fit but they don't change the story's point. Also the reason Clark put the the discussion of religious doctrine in there is to shift the reader's view point IMO. Make the Lama and his monastery seem a bit silly, especially in the light of the modern world. This makes the impact of the end of the story all that more poignant.
chc 15y ago
Talking about "Buddhism" as a homogenous entity is a bit misguided. Sri Lanka is primarily Theravada, while Tibetans practice a religion that is essentially their native shamanism overlaid with some Buddhist ideas. Conflating the two is like looking at a story in which Catholics pray to Mary and saying, "Nonsense! Christians only pray to Jesus. And he should know that, having lived in the largely Christian state of Utah for many years." Catholics are not Mormons, and neither is really representative of Christianity in general. Obviously the story is fiction, but Tibetan Buddhism is steeped in a lot of weird old rituals (not that they're sinister — just ancient and exotic). To me, it seems plausible enough for fiction that there could be some weird offshoot cult in Tibet that believed such a thing.

jacques_chester 15y ago

For a more mind-bending perspective of permutations, look at Jorge Luis Borges. In particular, The Library of Babel[1] and The Lottery of Babylon[2]. These two stories are a bit like HP Lovecraft for mathematicians and computer scientists. What starts with a simple premise turns out to lead to an ever-unfolding sense of dread as the story approaches the consequences of infinity. Babylon deals with probability directly, Babel deals with the concept of permutations. Some people say that Babel is outdated in the modern world but I disagree -- the fundamental problems still exist. The library is a platonic version of the "document-verse", just as the lottery is a platonic version of ordinary life. I thoroughly recommend these stories and all others by the same author to hackers. Be prepared to be deep in thought for some time afterwards. As for Arthur C Clarke, my favourite story of his was The Food of the Gods. Wonderfully paced and very funny. (edit: linked to better-formatted version of Babel) [1] http://simonsarris.com/lit/library-of-babel http://simonsarris.com/lit/library-of-babel [2] http://www.class.uh.edu/mcl/faculty/armstrong/cityofdreams/texts/babylon.html http://www.class.uh.edu/mcl/faculty/armstrong/cityofdreams/t...

pjscott 15y ago
I went and read The Library of Babel and was a lot less impressed than I'd expected to be. It describes a library world in which all possible n-character strings from a 22-letter alphabet, for large n, are written in books. This has very low information content -- I could write a program to print the library's contents in a few lines of code -- so I don't see what the big deal is. (I'm using the Kolmogorov complexity definition of information content here, which I think is the most useful.) Any filing system which can precisely specify any given book from the Library must contain within each specification (on average) exactly as much information as a given random sequence of n characters -- the catalog numbers have to be as long as the book itself! Given the Library's preposterously low information content, the characters' fascination with random searching seems kind of ridiculous. On the other hand, I loved The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover, which has some similar themes but is orders of magnitude more mind-bending: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/1/The_Finale_of_the_Ultimate_Meta_Mega_Crossover http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/1/The_Finale_of_the_Ulti...
- 15y ago

jcromartie 15y ago

Relevant: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/04/may-21-2011-judgment-day_n_804166.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/04/may-21-2011-judgmen...

gojomo 15y ago

In fact, there are only 21 million names, and the monks have secretly tricked crypto-currency enthusiasts into calculating them...

wickedchicken 15y ago

Odd, I actually have this book checked out from the library right now (this story, with others, was bound into a collection sharing the same title). Clarke's brand of science-fiction struck me as much more principled and technically interesting than most of his contemporaries. Most of them have the unique property among science fiction stories of actually being possible given our knowledge of astrophysics. The speed of light is a minor plot element in many, especially the fact that it can't be broken (no 'warp drives'). I don't know if it was Clarke himself who said this, but I recall someone stating that many stories break so many fundamental physical laws that they are more accurately classified as "science fantasy," not science fiction.

zem 15y ago

pretty neat maths problem inherent in the story: https://groups.google.com/group/rec.puzzles/browse_thread/thread/152e83bcefd45865/000214c0f0939a71 https://groups.google.com/group/rec.puzzles/browse_thread/th...