Everything, ever.

So there's this site called Library of Babel that I stumbled across. It's some sort of algorithm that lists every possible combination of the alphabet. It looks deceptive at first, but it is what it purports to be. There are several articles out there about how it works, so I won't cover any more of that here.

From it's About page:

Thus, it would contain 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. At present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 10⁴⁶⁷⁷books.

So somewhere in there are all future international bestsellers, tomorrows news, your life story, all your descendants life stories...everything.

It's...it's the Elder Scrolls. :-o

The monkeys got tired of typing?

Creepy.

"It's some sort of algorithm that lists every possible combination of the alphabet."

But how could that form a legible sentence, let alone a worthwhile story ?

I wonder what Borges would think of this.

all a sentence is is a combination of letters in the correct order

if you claim to list every possible combination of letters, then a sentence, actually EVERY sentence that could possibly be written, would be included somewhere in that combination. coherent sentences would be extremely rare but mathematically they would exist.

here's a bit on the topic wrt music ( combinations of notes ) rather than letters.

Yeah, yeah absolutely.

But that is where I was getting at: you would have to dig through millions of illegible sentences. To find one good one.

In other words: it would still take a lot of manhours.

i'm presuming the site algorithmicaly generates the strings on the fly based on the books "location" in the library since it would be physically impossible to store that many strings of characters in any form

i'm not sure if they built any kind of search engine to locate actually sentences in the vast mass of jibberish

to even find a simple sentence like "hello there" would probably be a feat without an automated search. the odds of 11 randomly selected characters forming that sentence would be in the quadrillions

thankfully there's a search engine to find something like that. so here you are. the sentence "hello there." ( including the period ) found among jibberish :)

it get's even creepier though. you can search for your own writings. in fact, i just found the text of your previous post.

also, whatever you think to post next, it's already on that site.

It almost...defeating, isn't it?

@comp_atkins said:

@R4gn4r0k said:

@comp_atkins said:

@R4gn4r0k said:

"It's some sort of algorithm that lists every possible combination of the alphabet."

But how could that form a legible sentence, let alone a worthwhile story ?

all a sentence is is a combination of letters in the correct order

if you claim to list every possible combination of letters, then a sentence, actually EVERY sentence that could possibly be written, would be included somewhere in that combination. coherent sentences would be extremely rare but mathematically they would exist.

here's a bit on the topic wrt music ( combinations of notes ) rather than letters.

Yeah, yeah absolutely.

But that is where I was getting at: you would have to dig through millions of illegible sentences. To find one good one.

In other words: it would still take a lot of manhours.

i'm presuming the site algorithmicaly generates the strings on the fly based on the books "location" in the library since it would be physically impossible to store that many strings of characters in any form

i'm not sure if they built any kind of search engine to locate actually sentences in the vast mass of jibberish

to even find a simple sentence like "hello there" would probably be a feat without an automated search. the odds of 11 randomly selected characters forming that sentence would be in the quadrillions

thankfully there's a search engine to find something like that. so here you are. the sentence "hello there." ( including the period ) found among jibberish :)

it get's even creepier though. you can search for your own writings. in fact, i just found the text of your previous post.

also, whatever you think to post next, it's already on that site.

I think this is hillarious for some reason :)

actually.. thought about it some more. the text isn't really there until you either search for it or enter in the correct location for it ( which is impossible to know ) sure you can randomly browse pages but you'll likely never find anything of much interest that way.

my guess is when you enter a search string you are interested in and that is used to generate the seed ( hex, wall, shelf, book, page ) for which that text would appear in. so yeah, if you knew the seed beforehand you could find your text that way, but there's no way to know that ahead of time.

Not without knowing the algorithm. I know it goes from Base10 to Base29 and I know that the text of the page itself can be transcribed backwards using the algorithm to produce the Hex/Shelf/Book/Page number, but again...it all comes down to that algorithm. I don't know if it's public I haven't checked.

That site has base64-encoded text for every child pornography image ever produced!

That site has comprehensive, realistic plots for overthrowing each and every government on the planet!

That site has instructions for making a nuclear warhead using only a paper clip and two matchsticks!

When will it be shut down? :-O

O.O

Boobies!

it also has a passionate in depth Stesilaus-Putin yaoi novel.

It is on. :-o

DUDE

I searched ''my future partner'' and it gave me 404.

Everything's gonna be daijobu..