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Comment by hateful | Hacker News Reader

> Only, what's the point of knowing the answer if, 7.5 million years later, no one can remember what the question was?

I remember it as them not knowing what the question was, not that they couldn't remember what it was. It's a very subtle distinction.

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IIRC it was more that they computer had to come up with the properly phrased question before it could answer it. It never shared the full question it answered.

From Wikipedia: "Deep Thought points out that the answer seems meaningless because the beings who instructed it never knew what the question was."

> IIRC it was more that they computer had to come up with the properly phrased question before it could answer it. It never shared the full question it answered.

It was exactly the opposite: the computer was able to come up with the answer, but insufficiently powerful to figure out the question, which is why it had to design an even more powerful computer, disguised as a planet (Earth), to compute the question.

Unfortunately (both for getting the question and for the people living on it), that computer was destroyed just before giving its output.

But it was later replaced.

EDIT: I'm not quite right - Deepthought was never able to identify the question, just the answer. It helped create Earth however. So the parent is correct. :)

Deep Thought needed to know the question to answer it, so it came up with the question. Importantly though, it never shared the question it came up with, just the answer. Earth was created to correct that shortcoming and identify the question for the humans.

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