6 ms·

The Nine Billion Names Of God (2021) [video]

93 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

cratermoon 4y ago
I'm not sure how Clarke came up with the number nine billion, but the short mentions 10 places, and shows the computer printing out some script that may be Tibetan or Sanskrit. I wonder how long it would take in 2023 to generate the nine billion combinations. Probably a few seconds.
- downvotetruth 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God#Mathematical_note https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God#... worst case n=13, 4bit char encoding: 4x9x115x10^8=414x10^9 bits~385.6 GB - all to RAM /~32 GB/s ~12s
- em-bee 4y ago
  what i have been wondering is, no matter how fast the computer prints the names, how long does it take to read them? if they can parallelize the task, assuming an average reading speed of 300 words per minute and the names having average english word length (5 characters per word), each monk reading for 16 hours per day, they would need 300 monks in order to read all names within 100 days. so it seems manageable, even if we add some slack or assume longer names, but a faster computer would not help much. more concerning is the printing speed. a dot-matrix printer in 1957 could print maybe 1500 characters per minute, and with the average word length of 5, that means one human could read everything as fast as the printer can print it. two or three people taking shifts around the clock would be enough to keep up. so the limit is not people but printers, and in order to complete the task in 100 days a few hundred printers would be needed, because a single printer at that speed would still need 100 years to print all the names. computer displays would not help much, because you still need one display per person.
- adiM 4y ago
  But printing them, would take some time and paper.
8bitsrule 4y ago
Great, unforgettable story, and very nicely portrayed. (Glad I got a chance to see it ;-)
irrational 4y ago
I had no idea there was an adaptation! Thank you for sharing!
protoster 4y ago
Well, that was straightforward.
pavlov 4y ago
Sometimes I think Bitcoin was inspired by this story. Instead of monks computing the 9 billion names of God, you’re computing the 21 million units of True Money. The devotion of Bitcoiners has a monk-like aspect of religious asceticism. Like the God-name printouts, you’re not supposed to actually do anything with the outputs of Bitcoin. Just hold them and pray until one day the process is complete, all the coins have been excavated, and the paradise of sound Money will reign on Earth.
- EarlKing 4y ago
  Once the last coin has been minted, every note of fiat currency will begin to spontaneously wink out of existence. 南無不可思議光怜. 南無不可思議光中村.
- GistNoesis 4y ago
  This is not so far off as one might think. You see, a lot of people believe in the simulation hypothesis. And sequential hash computation, aka proof of work, means that even from inside the simulation we can be assured by math, that the upper computer running the simulation has done the work. One might argue that the universe is doing much more computation every instant, but it's not so evident because of compression (for example algorithm like Hashlife). There are numerical shortcuts as anyone that has written a numerical simulation knows. For example you can simulate a black hole that may one time have been entire galaxies by just a few numbers (its mass, momentum, and spin). Proof of work, give us an upper bound on the computation available to us. The question is what is going to happen when we cross this bound. I like to call it Numerical Biological Instability : when you write big enough simulations you have to take into account for the emergence of unwanted sub-computations that may end-up stealing all your computation cycles. And I like the idea of NBI being one possible solution to the Fermi Paradox : We are the first advanced civilization because there can't be multiple advanced civilizations because as soon as we suck-up all the available computation the simulation speed crawl to a stop. And given that we can see to the edges of the universe with telescopes, it's not easy to put computational limits on parts of the universe without leaving observable traces. And given that computational power tend to follow exponential growth. Only universes with a single advanced pre-singularity civilization tend to be simulated.
imustachyou 4y ago
Based on the 1953 short story by Arthur C. Clarke https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.htm...
hiyer 4y ago
I remember reading this in the Reader's Digest anthology Great Short Tales of Mystery and Terror. Other classics in the book were The Rats in the Walls, The Hands of Mr Ottermole, An Invitation to the Hunt, The Damned Thing, and The Wendigo, among many others.
throw310822 4y ago
Curious, I posted the link to the short story here on HN just the other day. It had come to my mind while thinking about our race to train more and more powerful LLMs. As a software developer, intelligence is the ultimate problem to solve: the problem of all problems, the triumph of computer science over any other discipline. At the same time, it's the ultimate discovery: once it is achieved, we might as well wrap our stuff up and leave. So I hope you see the parallel with the monks putting the fastest supercomputer at work to find the names of God and fulfill the ultimate purpose of the Universe.
- jaybrendansmith 4y ago
  Great observation. This is the essence of the singularity. Once we've solved this greatest of problems, what do we do with ourselves? And what use are we? Of course this brings up that other greatest of Science Fiction short stories, "The Last Question"
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- joh6nn 4y ago
  > once it is achieved, we might as well wrap our stuff up and leave. I don't subscribe to an achievement based view of life. I think the best part of living is enjoying a good view, appreciating the company of friends, etc. I don't play chess because I'm trying to become a grand master, I play because it's fun and it gives me an opportunity to have positive interactions with single serving friends. To that end, if someone achieves the Ultimate Achievement, that's of no account to me; I'm not here for great achievements. I'm here to enjoy the view
- nervousvarun 4y ago
  we might as well wrap our stuff up and leave. We still play chess no?
BigCryo 4y ago
Much the same idea is used in the 1989 movie warlock.. a warlock uses a spell to uncover the name of God, which once spoken will undo all creation.. here's the final scene of this excellent movie https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tx2UlW_T8Zk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tx2UlW_T8Zk
- ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
  Also a similar theme is in Darren Aronofsky's Pi: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/
ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
As an atheist, there's something that appeals to me with science fiction that treats an aspect of religion as being literally and observably true. Ted Chiang is probably the pinnacle of that kind of fiction.
- sohkamyung 4y ago
  Some of Ted Chiang's fiction do raise some interesting religious questions. Off-hand, I can think of these stories with explicit religious themes: - Tower of Babylon - Hell Is the Absence of God - Omphalos
_448 4y ago
BTW, just a nitpick; this does not represent the philosophy of Buddhism. Buddhism is derived from the "adwaita" philosophy of Hinduism. Hinduism has two philosophical strands, "dwaita" i.e. dualism, (which is what Christianity, Islam and Judaism follow too), and "adwaita" i.e. non-dualism (which is what Buddhism and some section of Hinduism follow). Dwaita stipulates that God is out there, separate from humans. Where as adwaita stipulates that there is no external "God"; instead of searching for God elsewhere one should look within oneself to attain Moksha(in Hinduism) or Nirvana(in Buddhism). So it is odd that the Tibetan monks in the movie will print names of "God". The philosophy of dwaita and adwaita originates from the Hindu Vedic text. Anyone who does Yoga and chants OM(AUM_, to be precise) during meditation is actually practising the adwaita philosophy to attain Moksha/Nirvana.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  There are far more than two strands of Hinduism, and "Hinduism" itself is an artificial construct that homegenizes under one name what are actually hundreds of different religions, many of which are widely different from each other. For instance, there are atheist strands of "Hinduism"[1], which reject gods of any sort. I also fail to see what the various Hindu religions' views on god or duality/non-duality have to do with Buddhism. [1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_atheism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_atheism
  - _448 4y ago
    > I also fail to see what the various Hindu religions' views on god or duality/non-duality have to do with Buddhism. Because Buddhism is derived from the Vedic text on adwaita.
    - pmoriarty 4y ago
      So? Are you just mentioning this as a historical curiosity, or are you trying to make some point?
- quadrifoliate 4y ago
  While your Dwaita/Adwaita dichotomy makes sense in terms of general concepts, it's too clear-cut, and ignores some intersections between Hinduism and Buddhism. > So it is odd that the Tibetan monks in the movie will print names of "God". As you pointed out, some sections of Hinduism follow Adwaita philosophy. In the same vein, even though Buddhism doesn't have a pantheon like mainstream Hinduism, it still retains lists of named Buddhas [1]. These lists are common in Buddhism (see also the list of bodhisattavas [2]) as well as the related and older Jainism [3]. I believe that the core of the Clarke story is based on the overall concept of these lists, probably simplifying the concept of a Buddha to "God" for Western audiences. The closest related concept I can think of is the Holy Trinity, and most people in the Western world would struggle to explain the difference between Unitarianism and Trinitarianism. The filmmaker had a chance to correct Clarke's simplification, but probably hasn't studied the source material in enough detail to know or care. ---------------------------------------- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_named_Buddhas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_named_Buddhas [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bodhisattvas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bodhisattvas [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tirthankaras https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tirthankaras
machina_ex_deus 4y ago
Imagine a universe simulated under homeomorphic encryption. Where initially you have no control over the simulated universe, and have no idea what's under the encryption, but you somehow the universe is big enough that if you wait long enough, life evolves inside the encryption. Then all you have to do to break the encryption is to convince the simulated life within the encryption to prepare a special patch of space, with just what you wanted. They proceed to do so, breaking the homeomorphic encryption for you. Then you just discard their world.
blitzball 4y ago
I like the writings of Arthur Clarke, but I must confess, this story never made sense to me. How could simply compiling a list of names bring about the end of the world? Didn't the names already exist as ideas even before they were printed on paper? Why would printing all of them on paper make any difference? On a side note: how fast could a quantum computer generate the list using qubits?
- em-bee 4y ago
  my theory is that it's not the existence of the names or printing them that matters, but humanities awareness of them, that is a human mind reading and processing them. just like the apple always existed in paradise, but only biting into it caused adam and eve to be expelled.
bmc7505 4y ago
There is a similarly-themed short story by Liu Cixin, author of “The Three Body Problem”, called “The Poetry Cloud” [1, 2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poetry_Cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poetry_Cloud [2]: https://www.cuhk.edu.hk/rct/pdf/e_outputs/b7778/v7778p087.pdf https://www.cuhk.edu.hk/rct/pdf/e_outputs/b7778/v7778p087.pd...

93 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

I'm not sure how Clarke came up with the number nine billion, but the short mentions 10 places, and shows the computer printing out some script that may be Tibetan or Sanskrit. I wonder how long it would take in 2023 to generate the nine billion combinations. Probably a few seconds.

downvotetruth 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God#Mathematical_note https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God#... worst case n=13, 4bit char encoding: 4x9x115x10^8=414x10^9 bits~385.6 GB - all to RAM /~32 GB/s ~12s
em-bee 4y ago
what i have been wondering is, no matter how fast the computer prints the names, how long does it take to read them? if they can parallelize the task, assuming an average reading speed of 300 words per minute and the names having average english word length (5 characters per word), each monk reading for 16 hours per day, they would need 300 monks in order to read all names within 100 days. so it seems manageable, even if we add some slack or assume longer names, but a faster computer would not help much. more concerning is the printing speed. a dot-matrix printer in 1957 could print maybe 1500 characters per minute, and with the average word length of 5, that means one human could read everything as fast as the printer can print it. two or three people taking shifts around the clock would be enough to keep up. so the limit is not people but printers, and in order to complete the task in 100 days a few hundred printers would be needed, because a single printer at that speed would still need 100 years to print all the names. computer displays would not help much, because you still need one display per person.
adiM 4y ago
But printing them, would take some time and paper.

8bitsrule 4y ago

Great, unforgettable story, and very nicely portrayed. (Glad I got a chance to see it ;-)

irrational 4y ago

I had no idea there was an adaptation! Thank you for sharing!

protoster 4y ago

Well, that was straightforward.

pavlov 4y ago

Sometimes I think Bitcoin was inspired by this story. Instead of monks computing the 9 billion names of God, you’re computing the 21 million units of True Money. The devotion of Bitcoiners has a monk-like aspect of religious asceticism. Like the God-name printouts, you’re not supposed to actually do anything with the outputs of Bitcoin. Just hold them and pray until one day the process is complete, all the coins have been excavated, and the paradise of sound Money will reign on Earth.

EarlKing 4y ago
Once the last coin has been minted, every note of fiat currency will begin to spontaneously wink out of existence. 南無不可思議光怜. 南無不可思議光中村.
GistNoesis 4y ago
This is not so far off as one might think. You see, a lot of people believe in the simulation hypothesis. And sequential hash computation, aka proof of work, means that even from inside the simulation we can be assured by math, that the upper computer running the simulation has done the work. One might argue that the universe is doing much more computation every instant, but it's not so evident because of compression (for example algorithm like Hashlife). There are numerical shortcuts as anyone that has written a numerical simulation knows. For example you can simulate a black hole that may one time have been entire galaxies by just a few numbers (its mass, momentum, and spin). Proof of work, give us an upper bound on the computation available to us. The question is what is going to happen when we cross this bound. I like to call it Numerical Biological Instability : when you write big enough simulations you have to take into account for the emergence of unwanted sub-computations that may end-up stealing all your computation cycles. And I like the idea of NBI being one possible solution to the Fermi Paradox : We are the first advanced civilization because there can't be multiple advanced civilizations because as soon as we suck-up all the available computation the simulation speed crawl to a stop. And given that we can see to the edges of the universe with telescopes, it's not easy to put computational limits on parts of the universe without leaving observable traces. And given that computational power tend to follow exponential growth. Only universes with a single advanced pre-singularity civilization tend to be simulated.

imustachyou 4y ago

Based on the 1953 short story by Arthur C. Clarke https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.htm...

hiyer 4y ago

I remember reading this in the Reader's Digest anthology Great Short Tales of Mystery and Terror. Other classics in the book were The Rats in the Walls, The Hands of Mr Ottermole, An Invitation to the Hunt, The Damned Thing, and The Wendigo, among many others.

throw310822 4y ago

Curious, I posted the link to the short story here on HN just the other day. It had come to my mind while thinking about our race to train more and more powerful LLMs. As a software developer, intelligence is the ultimate problem to solve: the problem of all problems, the triumph of computer science over any other discipline. At the same time, it's the ultimate discovery: once it is achieved, we might as well wrap our stuff up and leave. So I hope you see the parallel with the monks putting the fastest supercomputer at work to find the names of God and fulfill the ultimate purpose of the Universe.

jaybrendansmith 4y ago
Great observation. This is the essence of the singularity. Once we've solved this greatest of problems, what do we do with ourselves? And what use are we? Of course this brings up that other greatest of Science Fiction short stories, "The Last Question"
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
joh6nn 4y ago
> once it is achieved, we might as well wrap our stuff up and leave. I don't subscribe to an achievement based view of life. I think the best part of living is enjoying a good view, appreciating the company of friends, etc. I don't play chess because I'm trying to become a grand master, I play because it's fun and it gives me an opportunity to have positive interactions with single serving friends. To that end, if someone achieves the Ultimate Achievement, that's of no account to me; I'm not here for great achievements. I'm here to enjoy the view
nervousvarun 4y ago
we might as well wrap our stuff up and leave. We still play chess no?

BigCryo 4y ago

Much the same idea is used in the 1989 movie warlock.. a warlock uses a spell to uncover the name of God, which once spoken will undo all creation.. here's the final scene of this excellent movie https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tx2UlW_T8Zk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tx2UlW_T8Zk

ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
Also a similar theme is in Darren Aronofsky's Pi: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/

ndsipa_pomu 4y ago

As an atheist, there's something that appeals to me with science fiction that treats an aspect of religion as being literally and observably true. Ted Chiang is probably the pinnacle of that kind of fiction.

sohkamyung 4y ago
Some of Ted Chiang's fiction do raise some interesting religious questions. Off-hand, I can think of these stories with explicit religious themes: - Tower of Babylon - Hell Is the Absence of God - Omphalos

_448 4y ago

BTW, just a nitpick; this does not represent the philosophy of Buddhism. Buddhism is derived from the "adwaita" philosophy of Hinduism. Hinduism has two philosophical strands, "dwaita" i.e. dualism, (which is what Christianity, Islam and Judaism follow too), and "adwaita" i.e. non-dualism (which is what Buddhism and some section of Hinduism follow). Dwaita stipulates that God is out there, separate from humans. Where as adwaita stipulates that there is no external "God"; instead of searching for God elsewhere one should look within oneself to attain Moksha(in Hinduism) or Nirvana(in Buddhism). So it is odd that the Tibetan monks in the movie will print names of "God". The philosophy of dwaita and adwaita originates from the Hindu Vedic text. Anyone who does Yoga and chants OM(AUM_, to be precise) during meditation is actually practising the adwaita philosophy to attain Moksha/Nirvana.

pmoriarty 4y ago
There are far more than two strands of Hinduism, and "Hinduism" itself is an artificial construct that homegenizes under one name what are actually hundreds of different religions, many of which are widely different from each other. For instance, there are atheist strands of "Hinduism"[1], which reject gods of any sort. I also fail to see what the various Hindu religions' views on god or duality/non-duality have to do with Buddhism. [1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_atheism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_atheism
- _448 4y ago
  > I also fail to see what the various Hindu religions' views on god or duality/non-duality have to do with Buddhism. Because Buddhism is derived from the Vedic text on adwaita.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    So? Are you just mentioning this as a historical curiosity, or are you trying to make some point?
quadrifoliate 4y ago
While your Dwaita/Adwaita dichotomy makes sense in terms of general concepts, it's too clear-cut, and ignores some intersections between Hinduism and Buddhism. > So it is odd that the Tibetan monks in the movie will print names of "God". As you pointed out, some sections of Hinduism follow Adwaita philosophy. In the same vein, even though Buddhism doesn't have a pantheon like mainstream Hinduism, it still retains lists of named Buddhas [1]. These lists are common in Buddhism (see also the list of bodhisattavas [2]) as well as the related and older Jainism [3]. I believe that the core of the Clarke story is based on the overall concept of these lists, probably simplifying the concept of a Buddha to "God" for Western audiences. The closest related concept I can think of is the Holy Trinity, and most people in the Western world would struggle to explain the difference between Unitarianism and Trinitarianism. The filmmaker had a chance to correct Clarke's simplification, but probably hasn't studied the source material in enough detail to know or care. ---------------------------------------- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_named_Buddhas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_named_Buddhas [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bodhisattvas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bodhisattvas [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tirthankaras https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tirthankaras

machina_ex_deus 4y ago

Imagine a universe simulated under homeomorphic encryption. Where initially you have no control over the simulated universe, and have no idea what's under the encryption, but you somehow the universe is big enough that if you wait long enough, life evolves inside the encryption. Then all you have to do to break the encryption is to convince the simulated life within the encryption to prepare a special patch of space, with just what you wanted. They proceed to do so, breaking the homeomorphic encryption for you. Then you just discard their world.

blitzball 4y ago

I like the writings of Arthur Clarke, but I must confess, this story never made sense to me. How could simply compiling a list of names bring about the end of the world? Didn't the names already exist as ideas even before they were printed on paper? Why would printing all of them on paper make any difference? On a side note: how fast could a quantum computer generate the list using qubits?

em-bee 4y ago
my theory is that it's not the existence of the names or printing them that matters, but humanities awareness of them, that is a human mind reading and processing them. just like the apple always existed in paradise, but only biting into it caused adam and eve to be expelled.

bmc7505 4y ago

There is a similarly-themed short story by Liu Cixin, author of “The Three Body Problem”, called “The Poetry Cloud” [1, 2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poetry_Cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Poetry_Cloud [2]: https://www.cuhk.edu.hk/rct/pdf/e_outputs/b7778/v7778p087.pdf https://www.cuhk.edu.hk/rct/pdf/e_outputs/b7778/v7778p087.pd...