What is the name of the supercomputer that gives the answer 42?
Answer
Deep Thought
What is the name of the supercomputer that gives the answer 42? Deep Thought. In Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Deep Thought is a colossal computer built by hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings to calculate the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Deep Thought spends 7.5 million years calculating and checking its result before announcing “42.” The answer is technically correct, but it is useless because the beings who commissioned the calculation never knew what the Ultimate Question actually was. Deep Thought therefore proposes an even greater computer: Earth itself.
A common mix-up is confusing Deep Thought with Earth, which is the computer designed to discover the question, or with the ship Heart of Gold, which uses the Infinite Improbability Drive. The joke works because the grand cosmic mystery receives an ordinary number rather than a profound explanation. Adams later said he chose 42 simply as an ordinary number with no hidden code.