This Digital Library Contains Answers to All the Mysteries of the Universe, If You Can Find Them.
So I thought that if I could find a cure for cancer, I would make a lot of money. I don’t have time to “study oncology” or “learn how things work,” but I love money, and I have a label: The Library of Babel. If there is a cure for cancer, it’s already written there, and it’s just a few clicks away and waiting for me to open it.
Created by Brooklyn-based author and programmer Jonathan Basil, makes the bold claim that it contains every up to 3200 character page that has ever been written, every page that will ever be written, and every page. that could ever have been written. … This means that on his virtual shelves are the answers to all the mysteries of the universe: the true identity of the Zodiacal Assassin, the winner of all the upcoming Super Bowls, and the cancer cure I’m about to find. So I can make a lot of money.
How it works?
I’m not going to pretend to fully understand the math and programming behind this, but in the Babylonian library all the possible permutations of 3200 letters, spaces, commas and periods are available right now in one of the library’s “books.” Search for literally everything you can think of – cut and paste that paragraph, type in the next tweet that hasn’t been posted yet, type in random gibberish – and you’ll find it already exists somewhere in the library. He was already there if you knew where to look.
The library does not create or save almost endless combinations of randomly generated sets of letters and punctuation marks – there is almost no hard disk space on the planet for this. Instead, it uses a “pseudo-random number generation algorithm” to create books with seemingly random distribution, without having to store anything on disk. “
This is similar to the seeds that Minecraft uses to create “random” worlds: insert the correct seed and everyone can find any possible page that exists in the same place for everyone. (Check it out for a closer look at the secret sauce behind the site .)
Looking for a cure for cancer
The first challenge (this is what I call “problems” because I am a positive thinker) in my search for a cure for cancer is that I don’t know where in the library to find a book containing a cure for cancer. However, somewhere on one of the many shelves, a page awaits. I’m feeling it.
Similar to the imaginary universal library in Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Library of Babel ” that inspired the site, the contents of the library are divided into numbered hexagonal “rooms” (not that they actually exist, they exist in theory, depending on how the data is sorted , which in principle is the same). Each room has four walls, 20 shelves and 640 volumes. You can walk into a hex room and pull a book off the shelf at random, but nothing is ordered by item.
I started off by going into random rooms and looking at random books, but all I found was gibberish. Then, fingers crossed, I hit the “random” button in the site’s search function, which led me to a book called “jdr, xblx, mormfic, nvuo, 1”. This volume does not seem to have anything to do with oncology. Same with the second, third and fourth attempts. I realized that digging through the shelves or manually clicking “randomly” until I accidentally hit the right book would take until the Big Freeze ended the universe, so I needed to better manage time.
Working backwards, I searched all the pages of the library for the phrase “This is how to cure cancer”, turned on the tab “surrounded by English words” and found a text with the following sentence:
“Here’s how to cure cancer. Mailgram regulates the cenogenesis of rented ostreophagia. ” Promising. But a second search for the phrase “Here’s how to cure cancer” led to a completely different set of random words surrounding her. And so on and so forth.
Infinity is very big
You could perhaps automate this task – develop a search engine that crawls the Book of Babel for books on cancer treatments and returns results in plain English only. But even on the fastest computer, viewing such a number of volumes would be impossible – there are 10 ^ 4677 books in the library. For comparison, there are about 10 78 atoms in the universe.
But what if you had some kind of state-of-the-art quantum computer that could drive the search? (I’m using “quantum” here as an abbreviation for “something that’s not possible but would be cool”). Can this find a cure?
No, sorry: this theoretical computer is likely to return many – many, many – readable, understandable documents purporting to contain a cure for cancer, but along with the actual medications / medications (if any), you will also find descriptions of all possible medications. which do n’t actually cure cancer, and anything that causes cancer, even if it says they cure cancer. You will also find all the possible permutations or variations of these pages that can fit within the character limit, so billions / trillions / quadrillions of pages are identical, but for one character. There is a lot to go through.
It’s the turtles all the way down
You can try using your quantum computer to determine the accuracy of the library’s cancer statement. Maybe look in the library for a page called “How to Determine If a Cancer Medicine in the Library of Babel is Accurate.”
Except that you end up with every possible method for determining the accuracy of cancer texts. You will need another guide called “How to Determine If the Library of Babylon Cancer Cure Guide is Accurate,” and so on and on and on and on. It’s turtles until the very end .
Even if you could develop a program that filters out all books other than those containing cancer drugs, which are at least plausible based on what we know about cancer, you would still end up with an almost endless supply of untested cancer drugs. … Including “eat a lot of onions”, “oddly enough, smoking cigarettes will cure cancer” and literally any other “medicine” that could be imagined / written in a space of 3200 characters. Too much to read, let alone test in any meaningful way, even if every person who has ever lived has dedicated their lives to the task.
I say: infinity is very great. And although there is a cure for cancer right in the Library (maybe on the shelf next to “df kl, gjtg, whzdfozdf”), I cannot find it and get rich. You too.
So what’s the point of the library?
In Borge’s story, when the librarians of an endless library determine that their universe really contains all possible knowledge, they are first delighted, considering themselves “the masters of an intact and secret treasure.”
They act like search engines, looking for books that “prove for all time the actions of every person in the universe,” or they are looking for books that explain how the library works, or they are looking for the Man of the Book, a mythical figure. who is said to have read the library index. But no matter how hard they search, they never find anything. Too many books.
Like a filtering program, the cult of librarians decides to get rid of any books that don’t make sense, but even the destruction of millions of unique volumes doesn’t make any difference to the library, as there are countless nearly exact versions of every destroyed book somewhere else in the library.
Surrounded by useless information, librarians generally fall into despair or try to prevent it by inventing systems to give meaning to their work and life. Despite the futility of searching, they still try to find the signal in the noise. (Maybe some of them wrote about this on a blog, I don’t know.)
So what’s the point of the library? What’s the point in that? It’s an interesting thought experiment about infinity, a way to visualize the real universe we live in, or a great way to spend a few minutes. Check it out and let me know what you think, or join the librarians on Reddit .
But I have money for a cancer cure, if you can find one.