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This was a short story which included a competition, in which the participants had to use an online database to find the answer to a complex question. It was something like "What was the stock price on the day when the temperature reached its highest in the city where..."

It was definitely pre-Google and I read it in the eighties, though the story (I think) may well have been older.

The story was set on Earth but at the time I read it, the idea of a searchable World Wide repository of all knowledge was Science Fiction.

I was interested to read it again because that concept is now a reality.

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    What part of it was sci-fi/fantasy? Granted, database queries might look like dark magic sometimes, but even in the 80s they weren't that taken aback by them... :)
    – Jenayah
    Aug 9, 2018 at 9:26
  • As Jenayah says, is there anything science fictional or fantastical about this story? If you haven't already, can I suggest you take a look at this guide and see if you can edit in any more details
    – Edlothiad
    Aug 9, 2018 at 9:28
  • @jenayah - I'm sure it was set 'in the future' but with regard to SF elements, there must be more to it than I can remember, otherwise it wouldn't have been very entertaining! I will think some more...
    – Peter Hull
    Aug 9, 2018 at 11:01
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    I'm voting to reopen with regards to the latest edit by OP and this meta post. Granted, given the fact that the story may be from the 70s-80s, we could argue for hours if a technology which was due to happen during the next decade is indeed SF (as opposed to a 40s story for instance); however, the question linked in Meta is still open, albeit with a negative score. I reckon the overall writing of the story at stake here might be SFFnal.
    – Jenayah
    Aug 9, 2018 at 17:01
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    I believe I have read this story, and it would definitely qualify as sci-fi. Essentially the scfi-fi bit is that there is a brain computer interface to the database, and the political candidates are eerily "spaced out" since they are trying to manage their public persona as well as retrieve and assimilate info in real time while holding a debate.
    – Nate White
    Aug 9, 2018 at 17:06

1 Answer 1

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This kind of contest is mentioned in Clarke's 1979 The Fountains of Paradise:

In his student days, he had won several retrieval championships, racing against the clock while digging out obscure items of information on lists prepared by ingeniously sadistic judges. (“What was the rainfall in the capital of the world's smallest national state on the day when the second largest number of home runs was scored in college baseball?" was one that he recalled with particular affection.

I wonder if you're thinking of that scene from the Clarke?

This article points out that the same book predicts the Google News Alert

http://technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=729

But the same technology that had eliminated one set of tasks had created even more demanding successors. Of these, perhaps the most important was the design of the Personal Interest Profile.

Most men updated their PIP on New Year's Day, or their birthday. Morgan's list contained fifty items; he had heard of people with hundreds. They must spend all their waking hours battling with the flood of information, unless they were like those notorious pranksters who enjoyed setting up News Alerts on their consoles for such classic improbabilities as: Eggs, Dinosaur, hatching of Circle, squaring of Atlantis, re-emergence of Christ, Second Coming of Loch Ness Monster, capture of or finally World, end of

Usually, of course, egotism and professional requirements ensured that the subscriber's own name was the first item on every list. Morgan was no exception, but the entries that followed were slightly unusual: Tower, orbital Tower, space Tower, (geo) synchronous Elevator, space Elevator, orbital Elevator, (geo) synchronous

These names covered most of the variations used by the media, and ensured that he saw at least ninety percent of the news items concerning the project. The vast majority of these were trivial, and sometimes he wondered if it was worth searching for them - the ones that really mattered would reach him quickly enough.

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    Andrew, I'm pretty sure that is the one - I misremembered, it wasn't a story in its own right, just a (v small!) part of one. I definitely have read Fountains of Paradise, it's the space elevator one and the main character dies right at the end, right?
    – Peter Hull
    Mar 6, 2022 at 16:53
  • Yep. That's the one.
    – Andrew
    Mar 6, 2022 at 17:10

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