

The (Unspeakable) Ultimate Machine - asciilifeform
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/the_unspeakable.php

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limmeau
A software equivalent could be a GUI program which steers the mouse pointer to
the close-button in the window's title bar and synthesizes a click there.

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Tichy
The tricky part seems to be retreating the arm into the box after switching
the machine off.

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sketerpot
Use a latching relay or something. Not too tricky.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relay#Latching_relay>

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godDLL
I just love this thing. It's completely perfect and perfectly complete.

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ableal
Reversing the arrow of time on this kind of thing has provided intellectual
entertainment for ages ... Nowadays, the most frequent answer seems to be "In
the beginning there was nothing, which exploded" - which may be true but is
obviously unsatisfactory to brains addicted to pattern-matching and causality-
finding.

Flipping the arrow forwards again, there's the "immanentize the eschaton"
angle.

Thanks for the link/article. Shannon is on my "people I admire" list, and I've
read some of his papers and looked around in the AT&T site, but this titbit
had escaped me before.

Do check the link in the article,
<http://www.research.att.com/~njas/doc/shannonbio.html> (and there's more
links in that page): "the man who invented a rocket-powered Frisbee and who
juggled while riding a unicycle through the halls of Bell Labs." Ha!

