9 Billion Names of God.

[jack]

I re-read the 1967 story 9 Billion Names of God by Arthur C Clarke, where a Tibetan monastery are calculating all possible names of God, which they think will be some sort of culmination of the universe.

When I first read it I hadn't noticed that it was written when using a computer to print all the possible combinations of something was still quite new.

It does feel like all those permutations make sense in a Buddhist monastery, but AFAIK he must have based that on Kaballah and made up the connection to Buddhism.

He wrote it in a long weekend away. But he added a comment that there was something wrong with the maths and he'd needed to fix it later so I guess he didn't QUITE finish it in one go :)

The numbers be gave were 9 billion names, 15,000 years by hand, 100 days by computer printout. A custom alphabet. 9 letters at most. And a few combinations are forbidden. I'm guessing he chose 9 billion as a good sounding title and a reasonable length of time, but that something^something didn't quite come out at 9 billion, so added the forbidden combinations or custom alphabet to adjust it a bit.

Comments

[catyak]

Depends on how many printers they had. A 1970s lineprinter could do up to 2000 lines per minute, so at one name per line, that's still getting on for 9-10 years. They could reduce it to just over a year by being creative and printing 8 names per line, then slicing the paper into 8 strips, tacking then end to end to get a single name per line.

Modern technology hasn't really surpassed that - a fast laser printer doing 30 pages per minute, typically 55 lines on an A4 page in 12-point font is only just over 1600 lines per minute.