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posted by takyon on Thursday May 07 2015, @04:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the infinite-monkeys dept.

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."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday May 07 2015, @06:47AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Thursday May 07 2015, @06:47AM (#179785) Journal

    Brunnen G? I always thought it was the Bruenen Gee. But point is well taken. And if I may add another equally or even more irrelevant Sci-Fi Show: one episode the Andromeda featured the "collectors", who seemed to be archiving everything that had happened in the past. The problem with veridical copies, however, is that once into them, they are reality? So we can only hope that the past remains dead, a dessicated corpse over which we theorize. Else, we go there and all vote for Marco Rubio! Noooooo!

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