Businesses are coming up with ever-sillier ways to identify themselves
ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1953) tells the story of a group of Tibetan monks who believe that an ethereal “bingo!” moment will arrive when they have discovered all the possible names for God. They calculate that this will take 15,000 years to complete if they continue with their old-fashioned method of writing by hand. So they rent a computer to speed things up. The computer duly gets to work—and when it spits out the final combination of letters the monks get what they wanted: “without any fuss” the stars begin to go out.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Nine billion company names”
From the October 24th 2015 edition
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