What about "Answer" by Frederick Brown? http://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html http://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html Perhaps the shortest SF story

What about "Answer" by Frederick Brown? http://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html http://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html Perhaps the shortest SF story worth reading... There's also some other "big scale" SF like Greg Egan's Diaspora or Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker that might qualify. Egan's book ends up with the main character having run through trillions of AI simulations in new universes, including higher dimensional ones. Stapledon's book is the story of the entire universe combining into one intelligence to attempt to contact God. The book was written long before computers, so it might not qualify as AI.