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Nine Billion Names of God

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57 pointsjcv21 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I read this for the first time today. I have to say I'm not blown away. Don't get me wrong, I'm a ACC fan. I'm not sure what makes other commentators think something like this is within the realm of scientific possibility. It is fantastic, generally underwhelming and the quality of writing isn't topnotch either.

Asimov's 'Last Question' bakes in notions of (super)computing, infinity, Gaia, big bang, the laws of energy and singularity with an astoundingly little amount of ink. At the other end of the spectrum, Borges' 'Library of Babel' is a spectacular and in my mind the definitive work on sci-fi magic realism, even inspiring the likes of Umberto Eco. Goosebumps galore.

This one is decent, but comparing to the aforementioned pieces of work is, IMHO, poor form.

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...

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...

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).

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

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

Have you given Alejo Carpentier a read? He has a very baroque approach to magical realism that I love.

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.

Upvote for the Asimov reference, a remarkable depiction of cosmic scale. But they're different stories.

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.

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

pretty neat maths problem inherent in the story:

https://groups.google.com/group/rec.puzzles/browse_thread/th...

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

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