I asked the Claude.ai chatbot if it understood my reply in this context. It did.

> Do you understand the meaning of "42" in this thread?

> Yes! The reply "42" by user consumer451 is a reference to Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In the novel, a massive supercomputer called Deep Thought is tasked with finding "the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything." After millions of years of computation, it returns the answer: 42 — which is useless because nobody actually understood the question.

> The commenter is drawing a clever parallel to fsddd's point. fsddd said that AI "doesn't actually know what a problem is" but is "incredibly good at searching through large spaces of information." That's essentially what Deep Thought did: it crunched through an enormous problem space and produced a technically correct answer, but without any real understanding of the question being asked. It's a pithy way of saying "yes, exactly — you just described Deep Thought."

> The original poster (fsddd) replied "Not sure what you mean by that lol," so the reference apparently didn't land!

- Zaphod Beeblebrox451