Presently, George glanced at his watch: “Should be there in an hour,” he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. At least there would be no risk, thought George, of the pilot being unable to take off. The sky overhead was perfectly clear, and ablaze with the familiar, friendly stars. On their way down to the valley, they have this exchange: They decide to slip away a few hours before the last permutations have been emitted, sneak down the mountain, and catch a flight out of the region before the project is revealed as a failure. Toward the end of the project, though, the Americans, recognizing the absurdity of the venture, begin to get nervous that these superstitious and primitive monks will blame the machines and their programmers for failing to bring about the end of the world. The monks figure, by recording every possible permutation, they will cast a wide net, and get the sacred names to boot, thus accelerating the ordinary procedure of history. According to their Tibetan belief, when all of the nine billion names of God have been discovered and then recorded within the sacred books, history will come to an end, because the natural world will have fulfilled its purpose of revealing all facets of God. Arthur Clarke’s 1952 sci-fi story, “The Nine Billion Names of God,” tells the story of two cynical Manhattan computer programmers in the early days of the industry, who were hired by Tibetan monks to write a program to spit out every possible permutation of a sequence of random letters.
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