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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: 3, Interesting) by Rivenaleem on Thursday May 07 2015, @01:12PM

    by Rivenaleem (3400) on Thursday May 07 2015, @01:12PM (#179877)

    The answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything was easy to find. It must be on one of the pages in the library. The tough part is knowing what the correct page is, and more importantly, given how "42" will be on billions of pages, and for it to be the answer, it would be the last 2 characters of the page, you would have to find a computer that could correctly identify what all the correct letters leading up to that are. It makes sense that it would require a vastly more powerful computer to work out the question than the answer.

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