6 ms·

The Library of Babel as Seen from Within: Reproducing Borges’s Library Online

72 points by diodorus 11y ago

scarmig 11y ago
Library falls short on I18N standards, doesn't use Unicode.
- dguaraglia 11y ago
  Interestingly enough, Borges decided to use the smallest possible alphabet for the library, not even including characters in the Spanish alphabet. Then again, this library is set in a completely separate universe... and it's the universe itself, so I don't think I18N is a problem there.
  - mkehrt 11y ago
    Not the smallest--Quine on Borges: http://hyperdiscordia.crywalt.com/universal_library.html http://hyperdiscordia.crywalt.com/universal_library.html
edko 11y ago
I prefer the Book of Sand, which collects an infinite selection of the most legible pages from the Library of Babel.
JulianMorrison 11y ago
strings < /dev/urandom | grep wisdom
minikites 11y ago
If you're interested in the math behind the library, you can't do better than this book: http://www.amazon.com/Unimaginable-Mathematics-Borges-Library-Babel/dp/0195334574 http://www.amazon.com/Unimaginable-Mathematics-Borges-Librar...
- davegauer 11y ago
  Or the library's own explanation: https://libraryofbabel.info/theory4.html https://libraryofbabel.info/theory4.html The thing that really got me going was finding and using the search feature! Until then, the library looked to me like an afternoon of programming fun, but little more.
mkehrt 11y ago
Quine's commentary, relevant to computer science: http://hyperdiscordia.crywalt.com/universal_library.html http://hyperdiscordia.crywalt.com/universal_library.html
prewett 11y ago
I wonder what percentage of the library is actually an intelligible book? I guess for purposes of calculation an "intelligible" book could be one that is completely composed of valid words in its target language; that would at least put an upper bound. Sadly my combinatorics and number theory is not up to the task.
- jlarocco 11y ago
  The exact math would depend on the definition of "intelligible" used and how big of an "intelligible" fragment you're looking for. Practically speaking, though, the answer is basically 0%. It would be a fraction with a big number on top and a very. very, very huge number on the bottom.
  - jonotrain2 11y ago
    Consider what Borges says about the impossibility of meaninglessness before feeling confident in such a calculation: In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense. It is useless to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons under my administration is entitled The Combed Thunderclap and another The Plaster Cramp and another Axaxaxas mlö. These phrases, at first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a justification is verbal and, ex hypothesi, already figures in the Library. I cannot combine some characters - dhcmrlchtdj - which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god.
eseehausen 11y ago
Of course, the point of the story was not universal accessibility but the decisions made by people confronted by this incredible randomness (some burning whole shelves after finding one incomprehensible page, some frantically trying to protect the works, some looking for the book(s) that would contain the contents- but of course how to know if they're accurate?). In some ways, the Borges story stands as a testament to the massive shift we've undergone subsequently: infinite libraries (functionally) infinitely reproducible. At the same time, though it was still prescient- one of the main problem of our times is no longer (re)production but curation. It's no surprise then that Google is the behemoth that it is.
sbilstein 11y ago
Awesome! After reading this story years ago in college I coded something up in php to make a universal image generator as well. I love Borges literature; I really recommend it for anyone who loves math and short stories. Some of his other greats are "Funes, the Memorious" (about a boy with a perfect memory that drives him insane) and "The Lottery of Babylon" (about a town that uses a lottery to coordinate all activities). You can read all of Borges' short stories in English in one volume: http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Fictions-Jorge-Luis-Borges/dp/0140286802 http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Fictions-Jorge-Luis-Borges/d... I really recommend it.
lisper 11y ago
> which now contains anything we ever have written or ever will write It's actually possible to demonstrate that this can't be true. You can calculate an upper bound on the number of different states enumerable in this universe. Basically you assume that each elementary particle is a computer operating at a clock rate of the Planck frequency and multiply by the time between the big bang and the heat death of the universe. The number turns out to be surprisingly small, about 2^500 or so. Longer than this (i.e. any longer than a tweet), and this universe is no longer capable of enumerating all the possibilities.
- edgarvaldes 11y ago
  Sorry, but can you explain this in layman terms?
  - ttctciyf 11y ago
    Roughly: the state-space of the universe isn't large enough to contain a distinct physical realisation of every book in Borges' library, though it is about large enough to contain every possible tweet (I think.)
    - lisper 11y ago
      Yep, that's it exactly. The calculation goes like this: There are about 10^80 elementary particles in the known universe. No physical process can happen faster than the Planck frequency (the frequency of light at which a single photon would have enough energy to form a black hole), about 10^43 Hz. The universe is about 10^16 seconds old. Multiply all those numbers together and you get 10^140 = 2^465. Even if you allow 10^100 seconds (a conservative estimate of the time until the heat death of the universe) you still only get about 2^700 possible enumerable states. Of course, if you want all the enumerates states to exist simultaneously then you can only encode one state per particle, and the number drops to 10^80 = 2^265, about 53 5-bit characters, not even a third of a tweet.
- jonotrain2 11y ago
  This would only be true if the library stored all of its books on disk. It doesn't need to because of the algorithm it uses to generate the books, which is described here: https://libraryofbabel.info/theory4.html https://libraryofbabel.info/theory4.html (davegauer linked to this description as well) You shouldn't think that this means the books do not exist. The concepts of presence and absence which underlie our understanding of existence were long ago inflected by the existence of virtual archives. Any digital archive, like JSTOR for example, exists as a mass of zeroes and ones, and only enters a form intelligible to the human eye once an article is loaded from its reserve. But I doubt anyone would say that these articles don't exist before they are loaded, come into being from nothing when someone opens them, and cease to exist again when they are closed. Already when Borges envisioned it, the library was more capacious than the universe.
sethev 11y ago
How would you name books in the Library of Babel? Giving each book a unique name would require as much information as the contents of the library itself. Unless you could re-arrange the library and bring the useful volumes together, you would never be able to make a catalog for it.
- eseehausen 11y ago
  Books don't need to have a unique name, just like in normal libraries. You can basically assume a title is the first X characters of the total Y characters of a given text. The goal of the Library of Babel isn't to be a perfect key-value store, just to create all the permutations possible within certain conditions.
intopieces 11y ago
If you're going to pick up Borges, do yourself a big favor and get the Norman Thomas di Giovanni translations. They were written with Borges and remain out of print because of a copyright dispute.
m0hit 11y ago
Exciting to see this on HN. npdoty and I have been cataloging this and similar experiments at http://webadaptation.org http://webadaptation.org along with working on some of our own. If you're interested do send me an email!

72 points by diodorus 11y ago

scarmig 11y ago

Library falls short on I18N standards, doesn't use Unicode.

dguaraglia 11y ago
Interestingly enough, Borges decided to use the smallest possible alphabet for the library, not even including characters in the Spanish alphabet. Then again, this library is set in a completely separate universe... and it's the universe itself, so I don't think I18N is a problem there.
- mkehrt 11y ago
  Not the smallest--Quine on Borges: http://hyperdiscordia.crywalt.com/universal_library.html http://hyperdiscordia.crywalt.com/universal_library.html

edko 11y ago

I prefer the Book of Sand, which collects an infinite selection of the most legible pages from the Library of Babel.

JulianMorrison 11y ago

strings < /dev/urandom | grep wisdom

minikites 11y ago

If you're interested in the math behind the library, you can't do better than this book: http://www.amazon.com/Unimaginable-Mathematics-Borges-Library-Babel/dp/0195334574 http://www.amazon.com/Unimaginable-Mathematics-Borges-Librar...

davegauer 11y ago
Or the library's own explanation: https://libraryofbabel.info/theory4.html https://libraryofbabel.info/theory4.html The thing that really got me going was finding and using the search feature! Until then, the library looked to me like an afternoon of programming fun, but little more.

mkehrt 11y ago

Quine's commentary, relevant to computer science: http://hyperdiscordia.crywalt.com/universal_library.html http://hyperdiscordia.crywalt.com/universal_library.html

prewett 11y ago

I wonder what percentage of the library is actually an intelligible book? I guess for purposes of calculation an "intelligible" book could be one that is completely composed of valid words in its target language; that would at least put an upper bound. Sadly my combinatorics and number theory is not up to the task.

jlarocco 11y ago
The exact math would depend on the definition of "intelligible" used and how big of an "intelligible" fragment you're looking for. Practically speaking, though, the answer is basically 0%. It would be a fraction with a big number on top and a very. very, very huge number on the bottom.
- jonotrain2 11y ago
  Consider what Borges says about the impossibility of meaninglessness before feeling confident in such a calculation: In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense. It is useless to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons under my administration is entitled The Combed Thunderclap and another The Plaster Cramp and another Axaxaxas mlö. These phrases, at first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a justification is verbal and, ex hypothesi, already figures in the Library. I cannot combine some characters - dhcmrlchtdj - which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god.

eseehausen 11y ago

Of course, the point of the story was not universal accessibility but the decisions made by people confronted by this incredible randomness (some burning whole shelves after finding one incomprehensible page, some frantically trying to protect the works, some looking for the book(s) that would contain the contents- but of course how to know if they're accurate?). In some ways, the Borges story stands as a testament to the massive shift we've undergone subsequently: infinite libraries (functionally) infinitely reproducible. At the same time, though it was still prescient- one of the main problem of our times is no longer (re)production but curation. It's no surprise then that Google is the behemoth that it is.

sbilstein 11y ago

Awesome! After reading this story years ago in college I coded something up in php to make a universal image generator as well. I love Borges literature; I really recommend it for anyone who loves math and short stories. Some of his other greats are "Funes, the Memorious" (about a boy with a perfect memory that drives him insane) and "The Lottery of Babylon" (about a town that uses a lottery to coordinate all activities). You can read all of Borges' short stories in English in one volume: http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Fictions-Jorge-Luis-Borges/dp/0140286802 http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Fictions-Jorge-Luis-Borges/d... I really recommend it.

lisper 11y ago

> which now contains anything we ever have written or ever will write It's actually possible to demonstrate that this can't be true. You can calculate an upper bound on the number of different states enumerable in this universe. Basically you assume that each elementary particle is a computer operating at a clock rate of the Planck frequency and multiply by the time between the big bang and the heat death of the universe. The number turns out to be surprisingly small, about 2^500 or so. Longer than this (i.e. any longer than a tweet), and this universe is no longer capable of enumerating all the possibilities.

edgarvaldes 11y ago
Sorry, but can you explain this in layman terms?
- ttctciyf 11y ago
  Roughly: the state-space of the universe isn't large enough to contain a distinct physical realisation of every book in Borges' library, though it is about large enough to contain every possible tweet (I think.)
  - lisper 11y ago
    Yep, that's it exactly. The calculation goes like this: There are about 10^80 elementary particles in the known universe. No physical process can happen faster than the Planck frequency (the frequency of light at which a single photon would have enough energy to form a black hole), about 10^43 Hz. The universe is about 10^16 seconds old. Multiply all those numbers together and you get 10^140 = 2^465. Even if you allow 10^100 seconds (a conservative estimate of the time until the heat death of the universe) you still only get about 2^700 possible enumerable states. Of course, if you want all the enumerates states to exist simultaneously then you can only encode one state per particle, and the number drops to 10^80 = 2^265, about 53 5-bit characters, not even a third of a tweet.
jonotrain2 11y ago
This would only be true if the library stored all of its books on disk. It doesn't need to because of the algorithm it uses to generate the books, which is described here: https://libraryofbabel.info/theory4.html https://libraryofbabel.info/theory4.html (davegauer linked to this description as well) You shouldn't think that this means the books do not exist. The concepts of presence and absence which underlie our understanding of existence were long ago inflected by the existence of virtual archives. Any digital archive, like JSTOR for example, exists as a mass of zeroes and ones, and only enters a form intelligible to the human eye once an article is loaded from its reserve. But I doubt anyone would say that these articles don't exist before they are loaded, come into being from nothing when someone opens them, and cease to exist again when they are closed. Already when Borges envisioned it, the library was more capacious than the universe.

sethev 11y ago

How would you name books in the Library of Babel? Giving each book a unique name would require as much information as the contents of the library itself. Unless you could re-arrange the library and bring the useful volumes together, you would never be able to make a catalog for it.

eseehausen 11y ago
Books don't need to have a unique name, just like in normal libraries. You can basically assume a title is the first X characters of the total Y characters of a given text. The goal of the Library of Babel isn't to be a perfect key-value store, just to create all the permutations possible within certain conditions.

intopieces 11y ago

If you're going to pick up Borges, do yourself a big favor and get the Norman Thomas di Giovanni translations. They were written with Borges and remain out of print because of a copyright dispute.

m0hit 11y ago

Exciting to see this on HN. npdoty and I have been cataloging this and similar experiments at http://webadaptation.org http://webadaptation.org along with working on some of our own. If you're interested do send me an email!