The Library of Babel

[GoldenLego]

This is slightly less interesting when you consider the fact that there's no possible way that these 'shelves' are actually stored on servers. There aren't enough hard drives on the planet to store it all.

I'm not familiar with exactly how this algorithm works, but I guarantee it's similar to Tupper's Self-Referential Formula, which is a function(edit: not technically a function but an inequality. yes I know it doesn't pass the vertical line test) that creates what's essentially an infinite list of 110x15 bitmap images arranged in a vertical column. If you want to find a specific bitmap image on that function, you treat the image as a binary number, multiply it by 17, and then graph the function with the range set from that number, to that number plus 15.

What the website is doing is taking your string and using math to find where, if this algorithm was run for eternity, your string would be in its infinite library. The fact of the matter is that this infinite library does not actually exist, and the hypothetical location and surrounding text of your string is created on-call when you enter in your message.

The take-away from this is that a 'library of babel' would be essentially impossible to generate. You'd have the world's best super-computers working on filling it for decades, and we would struggle to find even one coherent sentence in the piles and piles of incoherent gibberish. It takes a human being to provide it with an information-carrying string before it can ever find out where the meaningful sentences are, and that's why human brains are so much more fascinating than a computer program designed to spill out unique strings of nonsense.

Yes I know that nothing on this earth could store that information, but the catch is, you can reverse the algorithm (the characters that show up) and you get the same directory to where the page is stored. Meaning that it might not be stored anywhere but it's organization never changes, therefore the place in where it is "stored" never changes. Think of it like streaming a video game onto you're crappy computer, you're getting all the info and beauty of the real thing, but it's not actually being run on your computer. Except in this case there is nothing running the storage, it is just drawn out when needed from the algorithm.

I know the words don't really don't have meaning until it is actually conceived by a human mind, but it is still an interesting thought that everything that will be every said is in that library.

[Ad Bot]

[SeventhSandwich]

The Library of Babel is a library in which every 410-paged book is stored. It's physically possible to store that on an entire database.

No, it's definitely, definitely not. The names and contents of each book are generated on-call when you click on the image or pick a book. They do not exist in memory, but are generated from a complex algorithm in the moment.

The number of permutations alone shows that this library is incomprehensibly bigger than the totality of all Wikipedia articles. Let's pretend like this library contains every possible message made of the alphabet, whitespace, commas, and periods that's less than 3200 characters. The number of distinct 3200-character-long messages you can make is 30^3200. This is an enormous number, and given that each character in ASCII is a byte, the data you're gonna store is 3200*(30^3200) bytes. Even if we divide this by the number of characters in each 'book', storing the names of every book in the library is still going to be some incomprehensibly huge number.

They do not even have units for these orders of magnitude.

[SeventhSandwich]

Meaning that it might not be stored anywhere but it's organization never changes, therefore the place in where it is "stored" never changes.

That's the whole point of what I wrote. The location of the 'meaningful stuff' is not intrinsic in the algorithm. You have to give it the meaningful stuff before it knows where it is.

I know the words don't really don't have meaning until it is actually conceived by a human mind, but it is still an interesting thought that everything that will be every said is in that library.

But it's not. There's no information in it until you give it the information. The 'library' does not exist.

[Ipquarx]

You definitely could never actually store it anywhere. Even if every particle in the universe was its own book, you'd still be off by miles. The total number of combinations would be (alphabet + comma period space)^(number of characters in page * 410) which is a number with over 2,000,000 digits.  There's only 80 digits worth of particles in the observable universe.

[SetGaming]

Seventh, I greatly appriciate your knowledge on this, but isn't the whole web a "library" for information, and this is just a way to find a lot of it? Am I just missing something?

[Red Spy]

I made a text 2 speech outta this stuff. It's five loving minutes. And it sounds like a German trying to speak Korean.


Have a listen

[SeventhSandwich]

Seventh, I greatly appriciate your knowledge on this, but isn't the whole web a "library" for information, and this is just a way to find a lot of it?

No, because the difference between this 'library' and Google is that when you put in a keyword into Google, you get more information than you started with. Typing in 'beans' in Google will fetch you pages with information relevant to beans like Wikipedia articles, botany websites, pictures of bean-anatomy, etc.

Algorithms like these will only give you a number that you can 'plug back' into the algorithm to give you your original search term. The reason why this website divides things into arbitrary blocks like books, shelves, and hexagons is to obfuscate the fact that it plugged your search term into a reversed version of the algorithm and spat out an address that, when plugged into the algorithm, gives your search term back.

For instance, let's pretend that we have a function f(x) that maps every integer value of 'x' to a word in the English alphabet. When you type in 'beans', it plugs it into f^-1(x), the inverse function, and gets '343'. It then shows you 'page 4', where '343' lies, and it also calculates f(342) and f(344) to act as the other 'words' on the page. The entire reason why it divides stuff into pages and includes extra information is to create the impression that these 'books' are actually stored somewhere, but they're not.  

[SeventhSandwich]

There's actually a very good reason that I cited Tupper's self-referential formula on page 1, since it's pretty much exactly the same as this website.

Watch this video by numberphile and it should give you a rough idea of how this website works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s5RFgd59ao

[Red Spy]

found this little gem while I was reading the indecipherable language known as "spam"

[TheKid]

i bet thats fake

[Ceist]

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Found this hidden on random english of page 228. This stuff is legit.

That's a quote from Slaughter-House Five

[GoldenLego]

That's the whole point of what I wrote. The location of the 'meaningful stuff' is not intrinsic in the algorithm. You have to give it the meaningful stuff before it knows where it is.
But it's not. There's no information in it until you give it the information. The 'library' does not exist.

I understand it does not exist in a since, but the place of which it is "stored" is based on a variable of sorts that is deciphered but the program. So you could go page to page and find the stuff, it's not just based on you're input.

So mathematically it is stored by having it be based off of a organization of sorts. Even though it doesn't actually tangibly exist.

[Nonnel]

i bet thats fake

literally everything is written in here, that text does exist within it. The only thing is that he searched for that phrase, he didn't just find it.

[TheKid]

literally everything is written in here, that text does exist within it. The only thing is that he searched for that phrase, he didn't just find it.

this is such a loving weird library

[Mr Man]

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Well then...