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The Library of Babel

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  • The Library of Babel

    So, you know the story of how if you had infinite monkeys banging away at infinite typewriters, they would eventually randomly be able to write the entire works of Shakespeare?

    Now, imagine a computer program that could replicate that and create every random combination of 32,000 character text blocks. And then made it searchable. Would anything you search for 32,000 characters long or less be in there? Apparently the answer is "Yes"


    Introducing the Library of Babel.

    You can search for any text and it will return all pages that contain that text, and give you a unique page ID. It is completely invertible, the pages are not just generated on the fly, they always exist at that location. If you were to type in a location it would always return that page containing that text. It is kind of freaky.

    from the About page:

    About


    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 104677 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.

    ==

    As a test, I searched for the beginning text in this post.

    This is it's permanent location: https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark...szruyboyevwx27




  • #2
    So, on your search result, it's page 27 of 410. What does that mean.

    Because, if you replace that 27 with a 22 or 38, you get a whole bunch of gibberish and "random page" at the bottom.
    The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

    Comment


    • #3
      I thought this was about the library IN Babel, and wanted to ask in what language are the books.

      I'm incredibly disappointed.



      Securely anchored to the Rock amid every storm of trial, testing or tribulation.

      Comment


      • #4
        Title fixed before the prodder of bovines had enough coffee in him to notice

        I'm always still in trouble again

        "You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" --starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)
        "Overall I would rate the withdrawal from Afghanistan as by far the best thing Biden's done" --Starlight
        "Of course, human life begins at fertilization that’s not the argument." --Tassman

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
          Title fixed before the prodder of bovines had enough coffee in him to notice
          I'd like to go visit this lieberry and check out a book or two.
          The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post
            So, on your search result, it's page 27 of 410. What does that mean.

            Because, if you replace that 27 with a 22 or 38, you get a whole bunch of gibberish and "random page" at the bottom.
            basically according to the site, it generates every possible combination of letters (and commas and periods) in 32K blocks using some sort of algorithm. That means that most of it will be random gibberish, but that based on probability, every conceivable string of letters has to appear somewhere. So when you search for such a string, it will return all of the locations that string occurs. But the chances that anything else around it also makes sense is very small. Also the chance that you could randomly find a page that makes sense just by browsing is very, very small.

            He claims he is not just generating a page with random characters and your string in it. That you can use the code given to find that page in the library. And if you had typed in that location before you had even searched for your text, your text would have been there. I don't understand the math, but it is pretty spooky. To think everything you can imagine being written is already in there somewhere, among the garbage.

            here is a page about the theory of how it works. It was apparently inspired by a short story the programmer read about such a library.

            https://libraryofbabel.info/theory.html

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by Sparko View Post

              basically according to the site, it generates every possible combination of letters (and commas and periods) in 32K blocks using some sort of algorithm. That means that most of it will be random gibberish, but that based on probability, every conceivable string of letters has to appear somewhere. So when you search for such a string, it will return all of the locations that string occurs. But the chances that anything else around it also makes sense is very small. Also the chance that you could randomly find a page that makes sense just by browsing is very, very small.

              He claims he is not just generating a page with random characters and your string in it. That you can use the code given to find that page in the library. And if you had typed in that location before you had even searched for your text, your text would have been there. I don't understand the math, but it is pretty spooky. To think everything you can imagine being written is already in there somewhere, among the garbage.

              here is a page about the theory of how it works. It was apparently inspired by a short story the programmer read about such a library.

              https://libraryofbabel.info/theory.html
              Did you ever see the movie "the God Question" (or something like that) - these guys use a supercomputer to search for the existence of God, and they give the computer an AI program to allow it to examine everything on the internet - this would have been a good source for that.

              Long story short, the computer gets too smart, so they terminate the program, but the next time they start it up, the computer is even smarter -- turns out the computer began to realize what they were doing, so it would store it's research in encrypted files - songs, poems, plays - then search for them the next time they "killed" the AI and restarted it....

              This reminds me of that.
              The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

              Comment


              • #8
                For any programmers, this is supposed to be a python implementation of the library which could explain how it works.

                https://github.com/cakenggt/Library-Of-Pybel

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post

                  Did you ever see the movie "the God Question" (or something like that) - these guys use a supercomputer to search for the existence of God, and they give the computer an AI program to allow it to examine everything on the internet - this would have been a good source for that.

                  Long story short, the computer gets too smart, so they terminate the program, but the next time they start it up, the computer is even smarter -- turns out the computer began to realize what they were doing, so it would store it's research in encrypted files - songs, poems, plays - then search for them the next time they "killed" the AI and restarted it....

                  This reminds me of that.
                  I just looked it up. It is on Amazon Prime. I will watch it later.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Sparko View Post
                    For any programmers, this is supposed to be a python implementation of the library which could explain how it works.

                    https://github.com/cakenggt/Library-Of-Pybel
                    reading that I am not sure if that is how the library of babel actually works. It looks like someone's attempt to imitate it. But what it does is:

                    Specifically, when text is searched for, that text is padded with a random amount of characters on it's front and back side, or in the case of the Page only contains, it's padded with spaces on it's back side. Then, a random number in the range of each location value is calculated.

                    The page text is then converted from a string to a number. The location number is multiplied by a very large number and is then added to the page text number. Then the new page text number is converted into base-36, and that is the address.
                    So basically it is just encrypting a string of text along with random characters and then giving you the key to decrypt it as the "address" - not really that impressive.

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post

                      I'd like to go visit this lieberry and check out a book or two.
                      Lieberry: /ˈlīˌberē/

                      noun

                      The BlackBerry smart phones owned by Hillary Clinton and which she claimed only contained information about yoga classes, her grandchildren and emails from her husband Bill Clinton before having them smashed with hammers as they were being subpoenaed making it impossible to retrieve information from them

                      I'm always still in trouble again

                      "You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" --starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)
                      "Overall I would rate the withdrawal from Afghanistan as by far the best thing Biden's done" --Starlight
                      "Of course, human life begins at fertilization that’s not the argument." --Tassman

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post

                        Did you ever see the movie "the God Question" (or something like that) - these guys use a supercomputer to search for the existence of God, and they give the computer an AI program to allow it to examine everything on the internet - this would have been a good source for that.

                        Long story short, the computer gets too smart, so they terminate the program, but the next time they start it up, the computer is even smarter -- turns out the computer began to realize what they were doing, so it would store it's research in encrypted files - songs, poems, plays - then search for them the next time they "killed" the AI and restarted it....

                        This reminds me of that.
                        And after a period of 7.5 million years came up with the answer "42."

                        I'm always still in trouble again

                        "You're by far the worst poster on TWeb" and "TWeb's biggest liar" --starlight (the guy who says Stalin was a right-winger)
                        "Overall I would rate the withdrawal from Afghanistan as by far the best thing Biden's done" --Starlight
                        "Of course, human life begins at fertilization that’s not the argument." --Tassman

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Originally posted by rogue06 View Post
                          Lieberry: /ˈlīˌberē/

                          noun

                          The BlackBerry smart phones owned by Hillary Clinton and which she claimed only contained information about yoga classes, her grandchildren and emails from her husband Bill Clinton before having them smashed with hammers as they were being subpoenaed making it impossible to retrieve information from them
                          I should have known that you, of all people, would get that.
                          The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Originally posted by Cow Poke View Post

                            I should have known that you, of all people, would get that.
                            Everything you and rogue06 have said and will say in this thread is already in the Library of Babel. So is this. And this. and this. and this. https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark...lozvucxihtz110

                            babel1.jpg
                            Last edited by Sparko; 02-18-2021, 10:58 AM.

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              Originally posted by Sparko View Post

                              Everything you and rogue06 have said and will say in this thread is already in the Library of Babel. So is this. And this. and this. and this. https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark...lozvucxihtz110
                              Are the things I have not YET said there?
                              The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

                              Comment

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