
Nine Billion Names of God  - jcv
http://downlode.org/Etext/nine_billion_names_of_god.html
======
crux
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.

~~~
chernevik
Friend, the point of the story is that no matter how rational or scientific
your views may be, they are still based on assumptions that are beyond any
human verification. That fact should open our imaginations to some very
remarkable possibilities.

~~~
chernevik
My first downvote to zero! with no explanation why the comment is stupid /
offensive . . . .

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jacques_chester
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 Some people say that _Babel_ is outdated in the modern world but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> [2]
[http://www.class.uh.edu/mcl/faculty/armstrong/cityofdreams/t...](http://www.class.uh.edu/mcl/faculty/armstrong/cityofdreams/texts/babylon.html)

~~~
pjscott
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_Ulti...](http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/1/The_Finale_of_the_Ultimate_Meta_Mega_Crossover)

~~~
jacques_chester
I've seen the critique that the Library is uninteresting because it can be
generated with a series of nested for-loops to itself miss the many other
points.

 _Babel_ is not so much about the _library_ , or how it came to be, but about
the consequences of enumerating every permutation -- and there are many of
them sketched within just a few thousand words.

Amongst other things, the characters have no choice but to search at random.
There is no trustworthy index. The chances of finding the catalogue at random
and still further the chances of finding a _truthful_ catalogue are miniscule.
Yet there are still expected to be an unimaginably large selection of such
catalogues.

Even if you digitised and indexed the Library, you immediately face the same
problem: which books are sensible and which aren't? Every book, and every
potential book, and translation of these, is present in the library. How do
you know that 410 pages of "MVC" isn't actually a cutting critique of
information theory?

The ultimate irony of the Library is that ultimately, due to the presumed
equal distribution of characters, its information content sums to zero -- and
so too the algorithm which created it.

I feel as though you might find more to the story if you spend some more time
pondering it. Thanks for the link, I will read it (edit: oops, no I won't, I
haven't got around to _Permutation City_ as yet).

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baddox
This story is reminiscent of and inferior to Asimov's "The Last Question":

<http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html>

~~~
simonsarris
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>

 _By this art you may contemplate the variations of the 23 letters..._

~~~
jacques_chester
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
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
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.

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wickedchicken
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.

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

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zem
pretty neat maths problem inherent in the story:

[https://groups.google.com/group/rec.puzzles/browse_thread/th...](https://groups.google.com/group/rec.puzzles/browse_thread/thread/152e83bcefd45865/000214c0f0939a71)

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jcromartie
Relevant:
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/04/may-21-2011-judgmen...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/04/may-21-2011-judgment-
day_n_804166.html)

