'Yes,' said Deep Thought, 'I can do it.' 'There is an answer' said Fook with breathless excitement. 'But can you do it' Again, a significant pause. How does it feel? Glorious? Overwhelming? Like your brain is going to vomit a little? Just be thankful that, unlike in Adams' search for the truth, the entire Earth wasn't destroyed in the process. Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection. Using this crowdsourced supercomputer and 1 million hours of processing time, Booker and Sutherland finally found an answer to the Diophantine equation where k equals 42.Īnd so, without further ado, the question AND answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything is: Calculating values that large would take an insane amount of computing power so, for his next attempt, Booker enlisted the help of Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician Andrew Sutherland, who helped Booker book some time with a worldwide computer network called Charity Engine.Īccording to a statement from the University of Bristol, this network is a "worldwide computer" that borrows idle computing power from more than 500,000 home PCs around the globe. Still, this exhaustive search turned up no solutions for 42, suggesting that, if there was an answer, some of the integers must be greater than 99 quadrillion. (Image credit: Numberphile/ University of Bristol) The book 42: Douglas Adams' Amazingly Accurate Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything (2011) examines Adams' choice of the number 42, and contains a compendium of some instances of the number in science, popular culture, and humour. It only took one of the world's smartest computers to solve. Here's 33 expressed as the sum of three cubes.
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