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.
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As a test, I searched for the beginning text in this post.
This is it's permanent location: https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark...szruyboyevwx27
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
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