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132 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet? paper! Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein have shown space appears to have a limit to the quantity of information it can store. The quantity of information we are looking at here is greater than the storage capacity of the Universe and would collapse space-time to a black hole before I got even a fraction of the way through. Let us try to be a bit cleverer about the task of creating this information. The simplest way to tie the computer down is to run a much stricter program. Ask it to count up from one until you get to a number representing the novel War and Peace and then print it, stop and ring a bell. Loop i++ until i == “War and Peace...”; Print i; ring-bell; This program succeeds! I am triumphant. I have calculated the War and Peace number, and this time I did not miss the event. But, if you consider this a little more deeply I gave the computer the answer! I told it the string “War and Peace...” and it was able to count up, stop, and tell me it reached it. In mathematical terminology, the program is said to have ‘halted’ when it reached the War and Peace number and in computer science speak it is a special purpose program designed to do only this one thing. This program is pointless. First, it would still take a ginormous amount of time to get there and, second, it is trivially the same as running the program: Print War and Peace. i = “War and Peace...”; Print i; It’s just the same as me taking my laptop, finding War and Peace and pressing print. In no way is this equivalent to Leo Tolstoy’s creative effort of writing War and Peace in the first place. What went wrong? I wanted my computer to find an interesting string I did not already know. War and Peace is trivially computable after Leo Tolstoy created it but the question is whether my computer could come up with War and Peace or some similar creative work on its own. Can it create and, more importantly, understand it has created something? We have linked the ideas of creativity and understanding, and this will prove to be the key to the problem. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015822