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I went and read The Library of Babel and was a lot less impressed than I'd expected to be. It describes a library world in which all possible n-character string

by pjscott 16y ago

I went and read The Library of Babel and was a lot less impressed than I'd expected to be. It describes a library world in which all possible n-character strings from a 22-letter alphabet, for large n, are written in books. This has very low information content -- I could write a program to print the library's contents in a few lines of code -- so I don't see what the big deal is. (I'm using the Kolmogorov complexity definition of information content here, which I think is the most useful.) Any filing system which can precisely specify any given book from the Library must contain within each specification (on average) exactly as much information as a given random sequence of n characters -- the catalog numbers have to be as long as the book itself! Given the Library's preposterously low information content, the characters' fascination with random searching seems kind of ridiculous. On the other hand, I loved The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover, which has some similar themes but is orders of magnitude more mind-bending: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/1/The_Finale_of_the_Ultimate_Meta_Mega_Crossover http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/1/The_Finale_of_the_Ulti...

jacques_chester 16y ago
I've seen the critique that the Library is uninteresting because it can be generated with a series of nested for-loops to itself miss the many other points. Babel is not so much about the library, or how it came to be, but about the consequences of enumerating every permutation -- and there are many of them sketched within just a few thousand words. Amongst other things, the characters have no choice but to search at random. There is no trustworthy index. The chances of finding the catalogue at random and still further the chances of finding a truthful catalogue are miniscule. Yet there are still expected to be an unimaginably large selection of such catalogues. Even if you digitised and indexed the Library, you immediately face the same problem: which books are sensible and which aren't? Every book, and every potential book, and translation of these, is present in the library. How do you know that 410 pages of "MVC" isn't actually a cutting critique of information theory? The ultimate irony of the Library is that ultimately, due to the presumed equal distribution of characters, its information content sums to zero -- and so too the algorithm which created it. I feel as though you might find more to the story if you spend some more time pondering it. Thanks for the link, I will read it (edit: oops, no I won't, I haven't got around to Permutation City as yet).

by pjscott 16y ago

jacques_chester 16y ago

I've seen the critique that the Library is uninteresting because it can be generated with a series of nested for-loops to itself miss the many other points. Babel is not so much about the library, or how it came to be, but about the consequences of enumerating every permutation -- and there are many of them sketched within just a few thousand words. Amongst other things, the characters have no choice but to search at random. There is no trustworthy index. The chances of finding the catalogue at random and still further the chances of finding a truthful catalogue are miniscule. Yet there are still expected to be an unimaginably large selection of such catalogues. Even if you digitised and indexed the Library, you immediately face the same problem: which books are sensible and which aren't? Every book, and every potential book, and translation of these, is present in the library. How do you know that 410 pages of "MVC" isn't actually a cutting critique of information theory? The ultimate irony of the Library is that ultimately, due to the presumed equal distribution of characters, its information content sums to zero -- and so too the algorithm which created it. I feel as though you might find more to the story if you spend some more time pondering it. Thanks for the link, I will read it (edit: oops, no I won't, I haven't got around to Permutation City as yet).