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"To go out on January day and run around on the beach under a golden sun makes a very great change in your outlook on the universe."
- Robert Silverberg
 |
| Smart Dust | ||
| Very tiny computers. |
Lem imagines that computers can be no larger than tiny grains of sand; a desert becomes a massively parallel-processing computer system.
| "The desert on our planet is in reality no desert, but a Gigagnostotron, in other words a good 10^9 times more powerful than this primitive device of yours. Our ancestors created it for the simple reason that anything else would have been too easy for them; in their megalomania they thought to make the very sand beneath their feet intelligent..." |
| From The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age,
by Stanislaw Lem. Published by Unknown in 1965 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the ultraminiature spy circuit from The Unknown by Christoper Anvil.
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| IBM's Grain Of Sand Computer |
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