SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - Library of Babel

A library that contains everything that has been said or could be said.

https://libraryofbabel.info/

The video below explains how it works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1bbInWfAgA

Quote:

The books in the library of babel, are not actually collections of creative works written a multitude of times where only key words are need to find them. Instead, the library of Babel is EVERY possible combination of the letters a - z plus spaces, commas and periods. This means that the library of babel has every single one of the literary pieces you have typed in (Under 3200 characters) and any possible variation of them as well. If you were to type in only a piece of a literary work or poem, you would only be able to observe that singular piece that you wrote in as well as every position it could have on a page. In accordance to this, the poems you looked up exist SOMEWHERE but, the chances of you actually finding the specific page that contains the complete poem is so low it might as well be zero. I have actually done calculations for this and there is about 10^4677 books contained within the library each with 410 pages therefore there are 410x10^4677 pages that you can theoretically explore. If your poem is - lets say, 100 characters long - then, there are about 3100 possible positions for that poem on a single page. These pages are most likely not in the same book and are thus spread over on average 3089 books. (We also ignore the fact that there are pages that contain anywhere from 2 to 31 other copys of the poem) This means that we can divide our 3089 by 1x10^4677 giving us a number nearly infinitely small. This number represents the chances of you even finding the one poem you wished to find even whilst looking up a portion of it. SO, to answer your question, yes, the things you looked up are there; just the chances of you finding them are so small that it would take you more than the entire lifespan of the Universe to find them, even if you looked up over a billion pages per second.