[xpsdmxsf] THE ANSWER

If you could ask one question of God, what would you ask?

One sneaky idea is simply the above question itself, to have God look into you and provide you with the question-answer pair that will give you the most satisfaction of having spoken with God.

But let's try to get at the question directly. We want a question that is interesting, and for which the answer is not known. We want some assurance that the answer actually came from a deity, not just a mere mortal. Such an assurance should be encoded within the answer itself; that is, the answer should be self-certifying that it came from a deity. One way to achieve this is if the question is such that the answer is unknown to mankind, but once known, the answer may be verified by mankind. Examples of such questions are in the computational complexity class NP. Not every question in NP is difficult, in fact, "most" are not. We seek a specific NP question for which mankind has expended a great deal of effort, yet in vain, to discover its answer, yet thus far it has been in vain.

We want a question whose answer is significant on its own, not just for proving the existence of a deity.

We want a question for which we are sure exists an answer.

We avoid questions of prophecy because it seems our Universe is designed so that prophecy is in general impossible. Systems for which a classical approximation may be made may have their future predicted by mere mortals. We also wish to avoid prophecies that the a mere mortal can effect its occurrence by force. Prophecy is logically inconsistent with free will.

We want a question that is unambiguous and compact, to provide little room for the presumed deity to weasel a cop-out answer, and if you are suddenly put in a position to ask the question, you can have it memorized. We want the answer to be compact as well, in case there is only limited writing space on the stone tablets or you can only remember so much from your "vision".

Thus, here is my question: What is the second largest factor of the 12th Fermat number? We ask for the second largest instead of the largest to make the answer more compact, without affecting the difficulty of the question.

The answer is less than 593 digits, somewhat of a challenge for a human to memorize in a messianic vision, though you could ask for the answer in the form of a meaningful poem in rhyming iambic pentameter, whose each sentence MD5 hashes to 128 bits of the answer. God, and Bruce Schneier, can invert MD5 to use as a mnemonic.

This question has the bug that it is answerable by mere mortals with quantum computers.