Library of Babel

[mmntech]

Stumbled across this site. Some guy wrote a computer algorithm that takes every possible permutation of the Latin alphabet including punctuation marks. It then arranges them into books filled with random words.

The Library of Babel is a place for scholars to do research, for artists and writers to seek inspiration, for anyone with curiosity or a sense of humor to reflect on the weirdness of existence - in short, it’s just like any other library. If completed, it would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lower case letters, space, comma, and period. 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 104677 books.

Since I imagine the question will present itself in some visitors’ minds (a certain amount of distrust of the virtual is inevitable) I’ll head off any doubts: any text you find in any location of the library will be in the same place in perpetuity. We do not simply generate and store books as they are requested - in fact, the storage demands would make that impossible. Every possible permutation of letters is accessible at this very moment in one of the library's books, only awaiting its discovery. We encourage those who find strange concatenations among the variations of letters to write about their discoveries in the forum, so future generations may benefit from their research.

It's like a virtual version of the thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters. You can search any sentence up to 3200 characters long, it will find it, and tell you where it was found.

Site's been getting the hug of death since Vsauce featured it so it may be a little jankie.

https://libraryofbabel.info/

 

[JEDI]

wait.. what?
how would this ever be completed?

every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters into infinity?

so the Bible will be in there?
as well as War and Peace?
and the script for Star Wars: Episode IV?

 

[Ruptga]

I wonder which of his books has an article on pareidolia in it?

 

[GagHalfrunt]

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...

Boy, that raises some truly epic copyright questions.

 

[Triumph]

I don't understand...