In 1941, Jorge Luis Borge wrote The Library of Babel, a story which described an almost infinite library containing every possible combination of letters in a vast collection of 410-page books.
Jonathon Basile has spent six months learning how to make a virtual version that can generate every possible page of 3,200 characters:
The Library currently allows users to choose from about 104677 potential books. The site also features a search tool, which allows users to retrieve the location in the library of any known page of text. Any individual page of Hamlet or the Bible can be found in the library, but the possibility of finding any other page from the same work in the same volume is vanishingly small.
While the library contains every possible page, it does not yet hold every possible combination of those pages. If this restriction were lifted, Basile explains on the site, the library would house "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".
Basile evokes the comprehensive nature of the library's "blind volumes", saying: "To take a recent example, the confidential documents leaked by Edward Snowden... will be there somewhere. It's only a matter of knowing where to look for them."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by greenfruitsalad on Thursday May 07 2015, @08:41AM
this is similar to the infinite storage device in gnu/linux. There's a device called /dev/random and it contains everything ever created if you have the patience to read from it for long enough.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday May 07 2015, @08:57AM
if you have the patience to read from it for long enough.
Some times , .. . . . k .. . . the time spent . .. ;// exceeds . k. .. .. . time. .. . . . endMessage. Optimum Omega.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @09:05AM
That device is provided by the Linux kernel and therefore is independent of any GNU stuff. Therefore it is a device in Linux, not just in GNU/Linux.
(Score: 2) by kaganar on Thursday May 07 2015, @02:18PM
You may be wondering how the virtual Library of Babel can allow indexing and searching so efficiently where /dev/random does not. I'll be honest, I'm not sure exactly how the virtual library was implemented, but it seems probable that it works similar to the following:
Is it really a search engine? Well, yes, it did actually find some virtual pages in virtual books on virtual shelves in virtual rooms in the virtual library. :) It's just not a particularly useful search engine.