Barcelona is trying to create its digital twin. After mundane matters are sorted out — how to collect real-time data from sensors around the city, how to make a computer understand them, how to analyse and predict traffic and energy usage with machine learning and artificial intelligence — what is the overall aim?

“To build an oracle,” says Jordi Cirera Gonzalez, director of the Knowledge Society at Barcelona City Council, and a man not short on ambition. “Like the ancient Greeks’: a place where you can ask anything you can imagine and it’s possible to find some answer.”

Barcelona’s digital twin project will harness the power of the city’s supercomputer. Its latest version, MareNostrum 5, unveiled in December, has the ability to perform 314 million billion calculations per second. It lives within the deconsecrated Torre Girona chapel, on the campus of the Barcelona Polytechnic. Where once one might have prayed to God for an answer, now one goes to a computer.