"The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story."
But of course nobody is an entirely reliable narrator, and certainly not the author of The Guide so... Maybe?
(Edit: I see a peer respondent already linked it, but I'll leave this anyway)
Q: About three-quarters the way through the Illustrated Hitchhikers Guide there is a strange illustration of 42 multi-coloured balls lined up in columns 6x7. I can only assume this is the famed "42 Puzzle". My question is, how do you play? What's the puzzle?
DNA: The point of the puzzle was this: Everybody was looking for hidden meanings and puzzles and significances in what I had written (like 'is it significant that 6 * 9 is 42 in base 13?'. As if.) So I thought that just for a change I would actually construct a puzzle and see how many people solved. Of course, nobody paid it any attention. I think that's terribly significant.
It sounds somewhat equally exciting to, and less frustrating than, releasing software and seeing all the ways people break it.
Congratulations & good luck. I'm sure it will take you to interesting places!
[1] https://www.buttercookie.de/The%20Burkiss%20Way/Transcripts/...
- F is the 6th letter of the alphabet.
- I is the 9th letter of the alphabet.
- S is the 19th letter of the alphabet.
- H is the 8th letter of the alphabet.
6 + 9 + 19 + 8 = 42. IOW, the dolphins probably manipulated the experiment so that humans would give them more fish.
He wrote back an exceedingly kind hand-written postcard informing me that he appreciated my curiosity but that there was, in fact, no deeper meaning to 42 other than it was a nice-sounding number.
I could swear blind I'd heard/read him saying that it was simply a number that could sound amusing, be pronounced rather incredulously, was big enough for the multiplication at the end not working to work, without being too long to repeat in the actors lines or having an existing "meaning" that he was aware of (so 69 was way out because of reasons, as were things like 88 too for having commonly known (in the UK at the time) bingo calls, etc.).
Then again, my ancestors may have previously sworn blind about the giant mutant star goat thing so you might not want to trust the ponderings of anyone of my lineage...
"The number 42 was chosen for its deep philosophical significance."
“Not again!”
Actually Stephen Fry claims that Douglas Adams told him. But it seems he is taking it to the grave to honor his vow.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27...?
It is rather easy to assume that ASCII and wildcards would be common knowledge since they predate the series while being common knowledge today (at least among those who use computers), but was this true when the series was written? ASCII is by no means the only character encoding scheme and asterisks are by no means the only wildcard character.
And it was totally what he meant. The ASCII wildcard-existentialism theory is too consistent with the themes Adams explores through the series to have been an accident.
I fully agree with Musk when he said he regards the Hitchhiker’s Guide as a great work of philosophy, whether or not he was joking. It totally worked for me as I was trying to progress beyond nihilism.
https://www.harrods.com/en-us/shopping/harrods-no-42-earl-gr...
It's not a binary joke, either.
However, if you add together the numbers on all the faces of a pair of normal 6-sided dice...
Adams never revealed the origin of 42. [0] So, just because we really don't know, I'd like to think it originates with ASCII table and the asterisk.
0 - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/03/douglas-adams-...