Interview with the Colossus of Rhodes
The Interview with the Colossus of Rhodes is a recurrent series of interviews with the Colossus of Rhodes.
In the News
Colossus of Rhodes slow to reboot, hard drives may need defragmentation.
Nysa on the Maeander offers to host daily interviews with the colossus.
The Colossus of Rhodes (nonfiction) was a statue of the Greek titan-god of the sun Helios, erected in the city of Rhodes, on the Greek island of the same name, by Chares of Lindos in 280 BC.
One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it was constructed to celebrate Rhodes' victory over the ruler of Cyprus, Antigonus I Monophthalmus, whose son unsuccessfully besieged Rhodes in 305 BC.
Before its destruction in the earthquake of 226 BC, the Colossus of Rhodes had compiled over 230 terabytes of data, making it one of the computationally complex (nonfiction) statues of the ancient world.
Despite the physical destruction, most of the statue's software survived the earthquake.
A team of engineers (several from the Antikythera Team) rebooted the statue's operating system and spliced in a voice-communications module.
A solar eclipse (nonfiction) occurred during the reboot-and-splice processed. The engineers took fright at this ill omen, and fled.
The statue, left to run unattended, continued to upgrade itself to the point where it could take autonomous actions. Soon the status was making itself available for annual interviews, mainly on call-in talk radio shows.
Interviews typically occur between late November and the following February.
John Brunner has suggested that the pattern of interviews might relate to meteor shower patterns, but this has not been investigated to date (May 2016).