The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy meaning of life

When Douglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he added a central joke which has become more famous over the years than the novel itself: "The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything is

Here is how a perfectly ordinary number captured the interest of sci-fi enthusiasts, geeks and mathematicians. By Jean-Paul Delahaye. Christina Hemsley Getty Images. Everyone loves unsolved mysteries. Moreover our interest holds even if the mystery is based on a joke. Deep Thought takes 7.

The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy meaning of life

Suggestions or feedback? Previous image Next image. A team led by Andrew Sutherland of MIT and Andrew Booker of Bristol University has solved the final piece of a famous year old math puzzle with an answer for the most elusive number of all: All were eventually solved, or proved unsolvable, using various techniques and supercomputers, except for two numbers: 33 and Booker says he received many offers of help to find the answer, but instead he turned to his friend Andrew "Drew" Sutherland , a principal research scientist in the Department of Mathematics. Sutherland, whose specialty includes massively parallel computations, broke the record in for the largest Compute Engine cluster , with , cores on Preemptible Virtual Machines , the largest known high-performance computing cluster to run in the public cloud. Booker and Sutherland discussed the algorithmic strategy to be used in the search for a solution to Otherwise, the main difference between the search for 33 and the search for 42 would be the size of the search and the computer platform used. The computation on each PC runs in the background so the owner can still use their PC for other tasks. They ran a number of computations at a lower capacity to test both their code and the Charity Engine network. They then used a number of optimizations and adaptations to make the code better suited for a massively distributed computation, compared to a computation run on a single supercomputer, says Sutherland. Using the Charity Engine network is also more energy-efficient. As a result, the carbon footprint of this computation — related to the electricity our computations caused the PCs in the network to use above and beyond what they would have used, in any case — is lower than it would have been if we had used a supercomputer.

Explanation of phrases from the book by Douglas Adams. Computer scientists and mathematicians recognize the appeal of the number 42 but have always thought that it was a simple game that could be played just as well with another number.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a comic science fiction series created by Douglas Adams that has become popular among fans of the genre and members of the scientific community. Phrases from it are widely recognised and often used in reference to, but outside the context of, the source material. Many writers on popular science , such as Fred Alan Wolf , Paul Davies , and Michio Kaku , have used quotations in their books to illustrate facts about cosmology or philosophy. In the radio series and the first novel, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer Deep Thought , specially built for this purpose. Deep Thought points out that the answer seems meaningless because the beings who instructed it never knew what the question was.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [a] [b] is a comedy science fiction franchise created by Douglas Adams. Originally a radio comedy broadcast on BBC Radio 4 , it was later adapted to other formats, including novels, stage shows, comic books, a TV series , a text adventure game , and feature film. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is an international multimedia phenomenon; the novels are the most widely distributed, having been translated into more than 30 languages by In , BBC Radio 4 announced a 40th-anniversary celebration with Dirk Maggs , one of the original producers, in charge. The broad narrative of Hitchhiker follows the misadventures of the last surviving man, Arthur Dent , following the demolition of the Earth by a Vogon constructor fleet to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Dent is rescued from Earth's destruction by Ford Prefect —a human-like alien writer for the eccentric, electronic travel guide The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy —by hitchhiking onto a passing Vogon spacecraft. Following his rescue, Dent explores the galaxy with Prefect and encounters Trillian , another human who had been taken from Earth before its destruction by the self-centred President of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox and the depressed Marvin the Paranoid Android.

The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy meaning of life

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a comic science fiction series created by Douglas Adams that has become popular among fans of the genre and members of the scientific community. Phrases from it are widely recognised and often used in reference to, but outside the context of, the source material. Many writers on popular science , such as Fred Alan Wolf , Paul Davies , and Michio Kaku , have used quotations in their books to illustrate facts about cosmology or philosophy. In the radio series and the first novel, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings demand to learn the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything from the supercomputer Deep Thought , specially built for this purpose. Deep Thought points out that the answer seems meaningless because the beings who instructed it never knew what the question was. When asked to produce the Ultimate Question, Deep Thought says that it cannot; however, it can help to design an even more powerful computer that can. This new computer will incorporate living beings into the " computational matrix " and will run for ten million years. The computer is revealed as being the planet Earth , with its pan-dimensional creators assuming the form of white lab mice to observe its running.

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Still, a recent news item caught their attention. The world's first book printed with movable type is the Gutenberg Bible which has 42 lines per page. In , for example, Alan Turing showed that no algorithm can solve the halting problem for every possible computer program. September 21, 11 min read. The "Share and Enjoy" tune also is used in the TV series as the backing for a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robot commercial slogan : "Your plastic pal who's fun to be with! Problems playing this file? What does the barcode on one of the spheres encode? The number 42 was chosen for its deep philosophical significance. Ancient Tibet had 42 rulers. Join our commenting forum Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies Comments. British rock band Coldplay's debut album Parachutes contains a song called " Don't Panic " in reference to the series. Archived from the original on 7 November

Suggestions or feedback? Previous image Next image. A team led by Andrew Sutherland of MIT and Andrew Booker of Bristol University has solved the final piece of a famous year old math puzzle with an answer for the most elusive number of all:

Retrieved 22 March But both are more interested in a simpler but computationally more challenging puzzle: whether there are more answers for the sum of three cubes for 3. Six times nine is actually fifty-four; the answer is deliberately wrong for that question because the question was miscomputed. The marathon distance of The author himself rather undermined the myriad analyses when he dismissed them all with the simple answer that the choice of the number was a joke. Binary representations, base 13, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. Memory Alpha. Archived from the original on 2 March Archived from the original on 10 October He attempts to discover The Ultimate Question by extracting it from his brainwave patterns, as abusively [6] suggested by Ford Prefect , when a Scrabble -playing caveman spells out "forty two". On 3 November , he gave this answer [11] on alt. Adams has described the puzzle as depicting the number 42 in ten different ways. The asterisk, in turn, essentially represents "input whatever the user would like".