Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Short Story

The Parable of the Ultimate Computer

Michael Langford computes the future of computing the future.

Jane Greycastle was only paid on the scale of a technician, but after thirty years’ experience helping build Professor Redmayne’s cutting-edge devices, she felt she knew as much about them as the Junior Research Fellows who were part of Redmayne’s team.

The new computer had been dubbed ‘Deep Purple’, apparently because of some allusion to a device with a similar name. As she had heard the team members say, Deep Purple would be able to answer in its simulated human voice a range of questions that no-one had been able to answer before, since, based on new work in AI, it was provided with a prodigious rational capacity. It was moreover linked to a database of all the volumes in all the major libraries of the world.

There was also something else that made this megacomputer not only the most powerful ever to be constructed, but radically new.

…