Something I just thought of concerning Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy · 10:03pm Jan 16th, 2014
Okay, so Deep Thought was the greatest computer ever, right?
And she herself said she calculated the vectors of the particles of the big bang and could extrapolate their paths.
In other words, she was aware of everything in the universe and could extrapolate how they would interact. She could predict the future. Borne out by the fact that one of her first acts was to predict that she would design an even greater computer to come after her.
So she KNEW when she designed Earth that it would be destroyed moments before it came up with the question.
Which means she DIDN'T NEED IT TO COME UP WITH A QUESTION!
The Earth was a fake computer created so the Magratheans would leave for 7 billion years and when it got destroyed she could say "well that's not my fault, is it?"
Deep Thought did NOT design the Earth to calculate the Ultimate Question. She designed it to get the Magratheans to LEAVE HER THE FUCK ALONE!
Forgive me, I'm not really that into H2G2, so I apologise in advance if I invoke some heretical anti-canon or something, but I seem to recall that, in one of the books at least, Arthur discovers that life on Earth became a part of the computer, and so he himself holds the answer in his head, which he then draws out of a bag of scrabble letters.
So, unless Deep Thought was triple-crossing the Magratheans (Haha, the Earth is blown up, so you'll never get your answer! Except you don't need the Earth anymore, but none of you will think to ask me about it!), I think it more likely that the computer did as she was asked, precisely as she was asked, and they failed to get the answer because they never thought to come back and ask where to get the answer now.
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Or Arthur just got incredibly lucky with the scrabble tiles which does seem likely seeing that his entire adventure was temporally reverse engineered by the Guide Mk. 2
...Holy shit. I never thought of that. That's... brilliant.