Azaran on 29/6/2022 at 15:17
(
https://libraryofbabel.info/) The Library of Babel is a project that uses an algorithm to generate every possible book known to man, whether written or unwritten, containing 104677 books (10 with 4677 zeroes), based on Luis Borges' literary concept. You can search for specific words, sentences, and whole passages, and each will be found countless times in the Library.
So theoretically, everything that has ever been and could be written - all the lost works in the Library of Alexandria, the key to time travel, every future book, &c. - can be found here. The catch is sifting through essentially an infinite amount of books, and since all combinations are used, a good deal of them are nothing but gibberish. Even full coherent passages you can search for and easily find, are usually immersed in a sea of nonsense. Fascinating nonetheless.
I have a feeling this could be cracked some day with better search functions to filter out gibberish and zero in on books that have coherent passages without having to search for them.
Quote:
The Library of Babel is a place for scholars to do research, for artists and writers to seek inspiration, for anyone with curiosity or a sense of humor to reflect on the weirdness of existence - in short, it's just like any other library. If completed, it would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lower case letters, space, comma, and period. Thus, it would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be - including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on. At present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 10~4677 books.
Since I imagine the question will present itself in some visitors' minds (a certain amount of distrust of the virtual is inevitable) I'll head off any doubts: any text you find in any location of the library will be in the same place in perpetuity. We do not simply generate and store books as they are requested - in fact, the storage demands would make that impossible. Every possible permutation of letters is accessible at this very moment in one of the library's books, only awaiting its discovery. We encourage those who find strange concatenations among the variations of letters to write about their discoveries in the forum, so future generations may benefit from their research.
Inline Image:
https://i.postimg.cc/Xq88t2SH/Capture.pngmcd on 30/6/2022 at 06:52
Rightly so! This is endlessly, incredibly, blow your mind fascinating. It's akin to attempting to visualise and comprehend the number of stars in the universe, but way more useful. Potentially. Can I ask how long it took to find that text?
rachel on 30/6/2022 at 08:07
They have a search engine, so about two seconds, but you only get stuff like the above, a coherent word or sentence lost in a sea of gibberish. It is an interesting exercise, but the signal-to-noise ratio is too prohibitively large for it to be more than a curiosity.
Nicker on 30/6/2022 at 14:10
Creationist fodder.
Nicker on 1/7/2022 at 02:28
Quote Posted by dj_ivocha
What classics?One Million Monkeys: "Hold our bananas."
demagogue on 1/7/2022 at 06:52
Inline Image:
https://i.ibb.co/gVvk7nL/Image2.jpgThis reminds me a little of the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis. If you've studied quantum physics, you know quantum fluctuations sometimes bring particles briefly into existence at random only for them to vanish away in a femtosecond. If you wait long enough, these fluctuations could actually form atoms, then molecules, then groups of molecules. You probably have to wait longer than the heat death of the universe for the latter, but eventually they have to happen. If you wait long enough, eventually it could bring an entire brain into being for just a moment. But if you waited even orders beyond orders of magnitude longer than that, then your entire city could fluctuate into existence, your entire country, the entire planet Earth, the entire solar system, and if you wait long enough, the entire universe as we know. Unlike our universe, it would only flash into existence at random and quickly disappear back into nothingness. But it is extraordinary that so much structure has to come into existence at some point if you're really cycling through every possibility at random. Even our very existence right here and now...
That's one interesting thing I can notice from this little app anyway. No matter how long you write your novel, eventually you'll have to run into it fluctuating into existence
somewhere. But it's interesting to note the frequency. If it's just a few words or a sentence, you're going to run into it more often. If it's a long passage, you'll have to wait over vastly longer stretches before you run into it again. If it's a whole book, it's vastly longer stretches away than that. But you have to run into it eventually.
