The Answer Is 42

After 7.5 million years, Deep Thought gives the precise answer 42, then explains that its builders never knew the actual Ultimate Question and proposes a larger computer—Earth—to discover it.

A costly optimization run produces an exact, useless answer because the task itself was underspecified; outputs are uninterpretable without a well-defined objective.

Deep Thought correctly diagnoses the ambiguity rather than hallucinating; the joke indicts the requesters as much as the computer.