The Library Of Babel

Started by Mandle, Mon 03/09/2018 16:43:40

Previous topic - Next topic

Mandle

I just found out about this mind-blowing website today and plugged in my short-story entry in the FWC round of "Beautiful Brevity" to see if the library already contained it.

AND IT DID!!!

It already mathematically pre-existed in the library before I even wrote it on page 221 of Volume 25 (named: "mvsrimwrar") in Shelf #3 on Wall #3 in the Hexagon room called:

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

Now, you could think that the room name is just a coded version of my story, being actually longer than the story is.

But that's not how the library works.

It can handle searches up to 3200 characters and calculates every single possible combination of the 26 letters of the alphabet plus commas, fullstops, and spaces contained within 3200 characters.

So literally (hehe) anything that can be written within these 3200 characters must appear in the library.

This means that every single thing that has ever been written or said (in English) must be contained within the library's set of data.

Which means that every book by, let's say, Stephen King, is contained within the library, fragmented into 3200 character-long sections, granted, and each 3200 character sections would have to be found in different volumes.

But, this also means that every book that Stephen King never wrote, and yet written in his distinct style, is also hidden somewhere within the library.

And, this also means that every version of every book Stephen King wrote, or did not get around to writing (yet), also exists within the library, except with a single typo... and also versions exist with 2 typos... and also with the main character's name switched consistantly to a different name... or a name with one single typo in it once... or twice... or...

BOOM! MIND BLOWN!

Somewhere in this library are versions of the Twilight Saga that are actually good. Or Harry Potter books that end where Voldermort wins...

Actually, just go ahead and rewrite the ending to Harry Potter (up to 3200 characters), and search that, and you will find the exact book and page(s) in the library that your version already exists on, written purely by mathematics and pre-existing as a result of the way our universe works since the big-bang happened.

Of course, the same effect happens if you assign the numbers of Pi to letters, but it's not as searchable as The Library Of Babel. You can only go a few billion numbers into Pi on the websites that I know of and can only find very brief phrases like your name.

Have a browse of the library if interested. It's awesome and disturbing!

KyriakosCH

I know (a bit) of that site (and know the story by Borges :) )

I think that they have combinations up to some number of characters, but this doesn't include anything past those; i mean, it couldn't really include the actual number of books in the Library of Babel in the story, which do indeed cover all variations of the 26 (iirc) symbols used for the writing.
If the limit is (eg, as you said) 3200 characters, i suppose this just means it doesn't cover anything which has 3201 and more.
This is the Way - A dark allegory. My Twitter!  My Youtube!

CaptainD

I'm just wondering how this is different to the infinite monkeys (with typewriters) theory? It seems like pretty much the same thing to me though I have to admit to only giving it a cursory inspection.
 

KyriakosCH

#3
Quote from: CaptainD on Mon 03/09/2018 17:12:58
I'm just wondering how this is different to the infinite monkeys (with typewriters) theory? It seems like pretty much the same thing to me though I have to admit to only giving it a cursory inspection.

Afaik the site is just about presenting the (many) different cases for arrangement of symbols, tied to letters, for anything up to x number of characters. It isn't about infinity; afaik it is a presentation of all the different cases in probability. Eg (not saying they do this exactly) if you have 24 letters (example) and then the symbols "." and ",", and the empty space, that would make 27 characters in total. Now if you want to find out how many different cases of 3200 character arrangements can happen, with at most 27 different characters, that is (iirc) 27^3200 (cause each space can have any one of 27 symbols). If there were only 2 symbols, and 3 spaces, the result would be 2 times 2 times 2. Now it is 27 times 27 times .... for 3200 parts of this progression.
A very large number, but obviously not the one of the books in the story "The Library of Babel", by Borges, nor an infinite one.

If the site also shows any grouping that has UP TO 3200 characters (ie it can have 0-3200), then i suppose the complete number of variations is 3201 (ie 3200 different cases, and the empty set 0) times 27times27times...(for 3200 positions).

Don't quote me on this, but it is likely something like that one :)
This is the Way - A dark allegory. My Twitter!  My Youtube!

Mandle

Pretty much, except it's a lot more compact.

It takes the basic index number of the location and runs that through an algorithm to produce a unique and very big number which it then converts to base 29 so that every "digit" can be translated into a letter, sace, full-stop, or comma.

Or something like that.

As for books with up to 3200 characters: as spaces are considered characters these are all included. This is the case with my story I tested above. It exists first and "alone" on its page because all of the characters following the end are spaces.

There must also be a page where the first character is a space, followed by my story, and then followed by all spaces until the end of the page. And another where the child was chasing a balloon or a pet instead of a ball. And another where... etc.

KyriakosCH

#5
:)

Which still won't include all works that have anything more than 3200 characters.
An example where this is easy to see: assume a book had the first 3200+ x characters be all: "one half of/ one half of/ one half of/ ...". This would require the next 3200 to be tied to the first if you were going to have the book exist in its true form. Now just imagine a book (given supposedly this collection would include all possible books) that has as many characters as the total of characters included in all 3200 segments this library has (which is perfectly doable; those are finite). This in effect would mean that if that book was contained in this library then no other book would :)

Borges' story works because in it each book is only ONE work*. The number of books there is far bigger (character/volume wise) than in this site with the 3200 character segments. With current computer power we cannot have a similar number.

*Of course Borges' story also defines a set type/size for the book, but at least there it is supposed to be metaphorical; the entire library is the Cosmos.
This is the Way - A dark allegory. My Twitter!  My Youtube!

Mandle

True, but the complete works larger than 3200 words must still exist, except spread over many seperate volumes.

KyriakosCH

#7
Quote from: Mandle on Tue 04/09/2018 13:11:15
True, but the complete works larger than 3200 words must still exist, except spread over many seperate volumes.

They won't exist in this site's collection, though. Borges got the idea (partly) from the 1001 Arabian nights, where famously the storyteller deliberately makes her story feature an infinite repeat of the same phrase (about an ant that enters a storge place and takes a grain of food out, then the next one enters, etc). Likewise, regardless of how large (but still finite) the number of total characters the collection of all books in a site has, those still may not even cover one theoretical book with more characters than all of those, and those characters repeating the same phrase (or even the same letter, eg aaaaaaaaa and so on; i just gave an example with 1/2 of 1/2 of 1/2 cause that actually has specific sense, to be altered if you limit the characters :) ).

PS: in Borges's story, "The library of Babel", it is possible that the library itself repeats itself after all possible books (finite) are covered. Again, in a site you can't do that.

More directly put: if any two books are allowed to be the exact same (eg 1/2 of 1/2 of 1/2 etc), then you would need to also include all same cases allowed. But if your full number of sets is finite (the number of all 3200 character cases, in this site) you obviously will always be unable to include repeating books beyond a set size. In Borges' story, again, it is specifically mentioned that "no two books are completely the same".
This is the Way - A dark allegory. My Twitter!  My Youtube!

Kweepa

Quote from: Mandle on Mon 03/09/2018 16:43:40
Now, you could think that the room name is just a coded version of my story, being actually longer than the story is.

But that's not how the library works.
Are you sure?
To store all combinations up to 55 characters would take about 1.3 x 10^85 bytes, more than there are atoms in the universe.
To store all combinations up to 3200 characters, 1.5 x 10^4683. This number is just stupidly large.
Still waiting for Purity of the Surf II

Mandle

Quote from: KyriakosCH on Tue 04/09/2018 13:18:11
Quote from: Mandle on Tue 04/09/2018 13:11:15
True, but the complete works larger than 3200 words must still exist, except spread over many seperate volumes.

They won't exist in this site's collection, though. Borges got the idea (partly) from the 1001 Arabian nights, where famously the storyteller deliberately makes her story feature an infinite repeat of the same phrase (about an ant that enters a storge place and takes a grain of food out, then the next one enters, etc). Likewise, regardless of how large (but still finite) the number of total characters the collection of all books in a site has, those still may not even cover one theoretical book with more characters than all of those, and those characters repeating the same phrase (or even the same letter, eg aaaaaaaaa and so on; i just gave an example with 1/2 of 1/2 of 1/2 cause that actually has specific sense, to be altered if you limit the characters :) ).

PS: in Borges's story, "The library of Babel", it is possible that the library itself repeats itself after all possible books (finite) are covered. Again, in a site you can't do that.

More directly put: if any two books are allowed to be the exact same (eg 1/2 of 1/2 of 1/2 etc), then you would need to also include all same cases allowed. But if your full number of sets is finite (the number of all 3200 character cases, in this site) you obviously will always be unable to include repeating books beyond a set size. In Borges' story, again, it is specifically mentioned that "no two books are completely the same".

The creator's algorithm for each book location does not allow for any two books to be exactly the same, at least from what I understand about how it works.

So every book must be the even slightest bit different.

When you say that continuations of any book over 3200 characters do not exist in this library you are wrong.

EVERY possible 3200 character combination exists within the library:

Which means that every possible story up until 3200 characters exists somewhere, and also that that story's continuation also exists somewhere, except seperate.

The 3200 character limit is probably a result of how far search technology can go so far (I'm probably wrong on the reason for this limit).

Each time you search for anything the search engine is searching through 1^5000 (a 1 with 5000 zeroes written after it) possible results.

Mandle

#10
Quote from: Kweepa on Tue 04/09/2018 15:23:15
To store all combinations up to 3200 characters, 1.5 x 10^4683. This number is just stupidly large.

Yes, but the library doesn't actually store every single case. It solidly mathematically restores each possible case through an algorithm from the basic assumption that at least one book in the library has a single possible rearangement of the english alphabet (plus simple punctuation) in it.

In fact, the whole thing is downloadable and isn't very big at all.

This means that in "most" (I don't think anyone knows how many exactly) of 10^5000 cases you would have to "search" for a specific text to find a readable section, but that in however many other cases than "most" you could "browse" (and you can browse as much as you could ever endure on the site) for a start-to-finish masterpiece of a book (well, short story at the moment: up to 3200 characters) that nobody ever wrote, nor has ever been read before.

Now, that's probably never going to happen if humans are browsing the library. The chances of finding an understandable 3200 (or less) story at our reading and searching speed in infintesimal...

But what if there was an AI that could understand a book's narrative to the point where it could search the library (or future, bigger versions) for start-to-finish cohesive stories and tag them for humans to read and consider?

What stories could we find?

Well, we could find every book that Hemingway never wrote but exactly in his style:

Stephen King, and yes I like his writing and his depth of understanding of the art of storytelling and also his depth of understanding his own failings, once attemped a few first lines in Hemingway's style which I think are perfect, but he didn't continue the impersonation beyond that except to say that the book's plot was about an aging (maybe dying) hunter that used dogs as one of his tools of the trade (I really want to read that book!):

Here is that exact quote (which you can also find in The Library Of Babel, of course, and possibly the entire book(s) if you wamted to spend eternity looking for them (please tell me if you find one though. I really want to read that (those) book! (books!)):

“A man's life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. The first was the one that taught you. The second was the one you taught. The third and fourth were the ones you worked. The last was the one that outlived you. That was the winter dog. Cortland's winter dog had no name. He thought of it only as the scarecrow dog…”


Coincidentally, these lines appear in Mr. King's story about a man who has access to every library ever written in every possible version of our world, via a cross-dimensional rift that the Kindle he ordered and ended up with came through... (the rest of the story is pretty lame though, very disappointing basic time-travel bullshit... such a shame, as is often the case with Stephen King story endings that started with exciting concepts).

Could this be the start of the death of human-based story telling and eventually the birth of us just listening to new stories like children provided by AI storytellers?

Maybe? Probably not though... at least not on the current level that we understand fiction.

In my above case of the unwritten potential Hemingway novel about the hunter and his dogs:

Well, each of the almost infinite versions of the novel could be told to me by this fictional AI, but I would end up trusting none of them.

None of them were written by Hemingway. He is dead.

A lot of them could be very, very good stories. Some could be mind-blowingly good!

But they are also not written by the human being that was Hemingway.

I, for one, do not want to experience just "really good stories" even if they are amazing unless they were written by an actual human being who has had actual experiences and, therefore, a position they are writing from.

In the future though, who knows?

I could be just shouting "GET OFF MY LAWN!!!" with this post to future generations who enjoy AI writing as superior to human...

Ummmm... what was this thread about, again.....?

KyriakosCH

#11
(sorry, I think that by this point I am just theorising, so I will stop (laugh) )
This is the Way - A dark allegory. My Twitter!  My Youtube!

SMF spam blocked by CleanTalk