UK's new national supercomputer might be even smarter than Douglas Adams' Deep Thought

The late writer and satirist Douglas Adams, pictured in 1985 (Picture: Ed Kashi/Liaison) | Getty Images

What’s two times two? Simple, right? But what if you were asked to do 1,000 million billion such sums, how long would it take? Now consider that the UK’s new £750 million national supercomputer, on which construction work has just begun at a site near Penicuik, will apparently be able to perform that number of calculations in a single second.

Clearly, there are lots of important and serious things the supercomputer will be able to do. However we can’t help but wonder how long it will be before someone says: “O great computer... we want you to tell us the Answer" – you know, the answer to “life, the universe and everything...”

Rachel Reeves hails £750m Edinburgh supercomputer as cornerstone of UK’s AI future

Fans of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by the late, great writer and satirist Douglas Adams, will know that his fictional supercomputer, Deep Thought, came up with an answer, “42”, that needed a question, which then sort of turned out to be: “What do you get if you multiply six by nine?"

Sometimes the meaning of life is simple, sometimes not. But if you can look on the funny side, it definitely helps.