![]() The continents match up to what we had about three hundred and fifty million years ago. "Coding a search routine and figuring out what to search for was what took the time." How long did that take to find? In the entire cosmos of what, ten to the twenty-two stars?" Tim looked, and saw a blue-white sphere in the blackness, illuminated from one side by a brilliant yellow glare. One of the first things she had written was a software viewing port to take observations from the simulated universe. "Look what I found," she said, pressing some keys. And it was sheer coincidence that it was just now, just as Tim was about to be the second-to-last person to step out of the door and go home for the weekend, that her work had come to fruition. ![]() Then, just this Friday, she had suddenly started programming busily again. She had started out with a simulated Big Bang and run the thing forwards in time by approximately 13.6 billion years, to approximately just before the present day, watching the universe develop at every stage - taking brief notes, but knowing full well there would be plenty of time to run it again later, and mostly just admiring the miracle of creation. In some cases they had even had code ready and waiting to be executed. Obviously they hadn't built it just to see if they could. Brute force primality testing of every single integer in existence? Easy. Program going to loop forever? You knew for a fact: this thing could execute an infinite loop in less than ten seconds. Holy Zarquon, they said to one another, an infinitely powerful computer? It was like a thousand Christmases rolled into one. Not quite enough time had yet passed for the world as they knew it to be totally and permanently fundamentally altered by this news.īut it was still pretty exciting stuff. Putting into practice principles it had taken a trio of appallingly intelligent mathematical statisticians some 10 years to mastermind, and which only about fifty-five other people in the world had yet got a grip on, they had constructed an engine capable of passing information to and processing the responses from what could, without hyperbole, be described as a single fundamental particle with infinite processing power and infinite storage capacity. Specifically, they had, earlier that week, successfully built a quantum computer. They - by which we now refer to Tim, Diane, their eight colleagues, their two supervisors, four chemical engineers, six electrical engineers, the janitor, a countable infinity of TEEO 9.9.1 ultra-medium-density selectably-foaming non-elasticised quantum waveform frequency rate range collapse selectors and the single tormented tau neutrino caught in the middle of it all - represented the sum total of the human race's achievements in the field of quantum computing. "That's the name of the game," he replied. If you're reading this message, you're reading copypasta. Look at the big screen, it's easier than squinting at my terminal." "They're every half an hour," he objected. Tim already had his bag and overcoat on and his keys in his hand and was about to leave when Diane stopped him at the door. The shrug emoticon, made from Unicode characters, is also typed as ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, where "ツ" is the character tsu from Japanese katakana.This is an older version of this story, from 2007. The shrug gesture is a Unicode emoji included as U 1F937 ? SHRUG. People from the Philippines, Iran and Iraq may interpret a shrug as a somewhat impolite sign of confidence. In many countries, such as the United States, Sweden and Morocco, a shrug represents hesitation or lack of knowledge however, in other countries, such as Japan and China, shrugging is uncommon and is not used to show hesitation. A shrug is an emblem, meaning that it integrates the vocabulary of only certain cultures and may be used in place of words. The shoulder-raising action may be accompanied by rotating the palms upwards, pulling closed lips downwards, raising the eyebrows or tilting the head to one side. A shrug is a gesture performed by raising both shoulders, and is a representation of an individual either being indifferent about something or not knowing an answer to a question.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |