Talk:The Nine Billion Names of God
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Actually the number in the title is incorrect, it should have been several trillion. There's actually some info on that in the foreword in later editions. Would anyone happen to have that on hand?
Kim Bruning 21:47, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Infinite # of names, but can be summed up by "OM"
~mctwists
- That's a damn lie! Clarke never mentioned anything about any stupid OM! He mentions in the foreward that this arithmetic was challenged by JBS Halden, but Clarke managed to save the day by emplying some Alpha-Numeric evasions which he no longer remembers. Loom91 17:42, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Order-of-magnitude calculations
Hmm. 9e91/9 is about 12.7. This is not totally unreasonable: the Rotokas alphabet only has twelve letters. Now, about the three-letters-in-sequence restriction... a quick Monte-Carlo calculation suggests that with nine-character names, and a 13-character alphabet, only about 1.9% of possibilities are blocked by this rule.
Incidentally, how many "electromatic typewriters" did they need to do the job? A 110 baud Teletype machine, with 2 stop bits and one start bit, will output at 10 cps (the noise still rings in my ears), so that would take a minimum of 9e10 chars/10cps = 9e9 seconds = 104166 days on a single teletype machine (and don't even get me started on the carriage returns and idle stuffing). To do it in "a thousand days", they'd need approximately 100 teletypes: still, that's not beyond the bounds of reason, considering the capabilities of 1967-era mainframes like the IBM 360/67, and assuming a custom terminal concentrator setup.
A modern implementation of this, with output written to disk, would likely be filesystem-limited, so at (let's say) around 10Mbytes/s sustained disk-write throughput, the job would take 9000 seconds, which is 2.5 hours, or 9600 times faster than the "thousand days" of the story.
However, let's assume the monks want a hard copy. A fast laser printer can do 37 ppm, and assuming a clearly legible type size which would give 166 x 80 chars on a sheet, we can print 37 * 166 * 80 / 60 = 8189 chars per second. So, one of these would take 9e10 / 8186 = 127 days to complete the run. A bank of 100 could do the work in 1.27 days. Indeed, with a PostScript program, there probably would be no need for central computer control: each printer could be sent a PostScript program to do its part of the job, and then allowed to get on with it by itself.
How big would the paper output be?
Assuming 9e10 chars, and 166 x 80 character pages, there would be 6,777,108 output pages. If these were bound in 1000 page volumes, there would be 6.7 thousand volumes, which would take up roughly 5cm x 6777 = 339 meters of shelf space at 5cm/book, = 452 x 75cm bookshelves, = 91 5-shelf bookcases.
-- Karada 13:38, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
- Your numeric studies are quite interesting, however lost on a predictable and pointless story. Clarke's other famous spiritual sci-fi, The Star is a lot better in that respect. Loom91 10:36, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Illegal link
The link added by Machuka is a violation of Clarkes copyright. I'm not yet deleting it, but I believe posting links to illegal online copys of copyrighted material is against Wikipedia policies. If you are reading this Machuka, don't do things like this again because you will never manage to get way with it. Loom91 17:57, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
- My bad as well. Palm_Dogg 14:01, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
I am removing the link in accordance with Wikipedia policy; we cannot link to an outside site that is violating copyright. Too bad. It was nice to have it just right there. Please still assume good faith. Lebroyl 21:27, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Quote
The quote is slightly off--missing the word "always".
- "Look," whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.) --ScarletSpiderDave 06:25, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
