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The Nine Billion Names of God

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The Nine Billion Names of God is a 1953 short story by Arthur C. Clarke; the phrase also appears in the title of a collection of Clarke's short stories, The Nine Billion Names of God: The Best Short Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (1967).

It was the winner (in 2004) of the retrospective Hugo Award for Best Short Story for the year 1954.

Summary

This short story tells of a Buddhist monastery whose monks have long sought to discover the one true name of God. The monks create a writing system in which, they calculate, they can encode all possible names of God in no more than nine characters, according to a set of constraints. For example, no words can have the same character repeating more than three times consecutively.

They purchase a computer capable of printing all the possible permutations, and they hire two Westerners to install and program the machine. The computer operators are skeptical, but the monks believe that when the computer has printed all the names, existence will lose all meaning, and God will "wind up" the universe.

The operators engage the computer. After three months, as the job nears completion, they fear the reaction of the monks when existence will fail to end. The men decide to flee the monastery some hours before the computer finishes its task. After their successful escape, they pause on their way back to civilization at about the same time the computer prints the final name. They look back, and "overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

References

See also

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