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Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?

sufficient to code almost all the world’s symbols, so we can avoid any accusation of being language-ist! Here are some examples of the

Φ ﾃ あ Q ボ 杏 碓 П Ж Я

Ancient Greek, Japanese:
Kanji, Katakana, Chinese,
and Russia-Cyrillic
Symbols

characters represented by Unicode.

For our discussion, it does not matter which language War and Peace is written in. We just treat the symbols as numbers. I am going assume the English translation which has around 500,000 words; a nice round number. Assuming a generous 10 characters per word, War and Peace is approximately 10-megabytes – that’s about the same size as a music track on iTunes. In practice, the book uses a bit more memory, as there is some overhead for formatting information. My laptop has a 500 Gigabyte hard disk so I could fit half a million copies of War and Peace on it!

If we take a look at the contents of the file on my computer the book starts:

8710110810844801141051109910144115111

Can a computer calculate this number?

The obvious answer is YES. It is just an integer like 1, 3 or 42. Granted it’s a large number, but the length of the number is simply the length of all the symbols in the book coded into Unicode – about 10 million digits. We have already determined this number can be stored on my hard disk half a million times, so it’s not an unimaginably large number. How long would it take to calculate the number corresponding to War and Peace?

The simplest method is to count up starting at 1 then 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on until I try every number. Will this eventually get to the War and Peace number? The answer is yes. Eureka! All of human knowledge is computable. I have written this computation out as a simple computer program below. It says, in plain English, start at zero, go round a loop counting up one at a time and print each number as you go along.

i==0; Loop i++ Print i;

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