Identify an Asimovish short story

Cafe Society
1

Can anybody help me track down this short story?
It sounds like an Asimov story but I’ve read a lot of his short story collections recently and not found it.

Two men are in a debate over the most powerful machine ever built. The first one suggests that given 5 minutes alone with the machine he could completly shut it down, no tools needed. The other man, states it’s completely impossible, the machine is completly immune to all logical paradoxes, nothing that the first guy said could possibly confuse it enough to shut down. Eventually guy 2 accedes to guy 1, and lets him have his 5 minutes just to prove his point, but guy 1 does indeed manage to shut the machine down. I can’t remember what guy 1 did though, what his motivation was, or who wrote it if not Asimivov. This has become an occasional dull itch in the back of my mind over the years but I can’t remember any more details than that.

2

It sounds a bit like an episode (“The General”) from The Prisoner TV show, but the scenario is different.

No. 6 states that he can ask a question that an all-knowing computer cannot answer. He is eventually allowed to ask the question. The question of course is:

[spoiler]“Why does the porridge bird lay his eggs in the air?”

No, of course not.

The real question is “Why?” which I found to be fairly uninspired script writing. [/spoiler]

and the computer shuts down with the usual pyrotechnics.

3

Maybe he reprogrammed it with a very large axe.

4

Could it be a Sheckley story?

5

Perhaps it was something simple and counter-intuitive like pull the power plug?