SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @07:42AM
What next to do is to search for:
"aaaaaaaaaaaaa.....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaba"
"aaaaaaaaaaaaa.....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaabb"
...
"aaaaaaaaaaaaa.....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaabz"
"aaaaaaaaaaaaa.....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaab,"
"aaaaaaaaaaaaa.....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaab."
Then search for
"aaaaaaaaaaaaa.....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaab"
And see if the second search turns up an exact match page in the first set. ;)
Coz I wonder if the guy is not just having a program make BS up on the fly, insert the search key in and then memorize the search key + salt/seed to make sure that repeated searches produce the same BS pages.
If he isn't, then yes I can see why he took 6 months to do it. Otherwise...
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Thursday May 07 2015, @08:27AM
I can do better than him: I can write you a software that gives you any possible text of the world by just entering its index. To save space, I decided to encode the index not as digit string, but as a sequence of Unicode UTF-8 characters. And for simplicity I decided to use the Unicode UTF-8 encoding of that text as index.
So basically, my program takes UTF-8 as input, and gives the same UTF-8 back. Voila, the infinite library.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @11:15AM
(Score: 2) by TK on Thursday May 07 2015, @04:51PM
How many pages are the rough equivalent of:
alas, poor yorick. i knew him, horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
So I have to search for the entire 3200 character string I'm looking for in order to find the one page that contains that exact combination. The character set is a-z, full stop (.), comma (,), and space ( ). 29 characters in all.
If I searched for pages of Hamlet that contain those two sentences, I would have to sort through 29^(3200-91) pages. to find the page that has the entire rest of text after it.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum