>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.
I'm asking if it's actually possible for them to have calculated or stored all those permutations...
Carter Collins
How can I find qt loli books here?
Evan Garcia
It doesn't store anything. Only bookmarks. It's possible to calculate any combination on request, but not to have gone through it all.
Colton Scott
No, the text would be far too big if they were to precalculate it. What they appear to have is a clever algorithm that both generates the books deterministically and can be used to find instances of searched strings within them.
Brandon Long
Well look what I found
Thomas Martin
How could they possibly calculate the permutation's position without having gone through them all? In that case, anything's position would be completely arbitrary, because they could potentially use any number of algorithms to calculate the permutations. And it's obvious they're trying to give off the impression that every possible written thing exists up to 3200 characters, as in, that they've already calculated all of it. That's supposed to be the whole spooky idea of this shit, that makes you "reflect on the weirdness of existence." It's no surprise that it's a ruse.
Lucas Gutierrez
It's been a long time for it to just be a ruse.
Cooper Morris
>anything's position would be completely arbitrary No it wouldn't, the algorithm is deterministic, the position can clearly be predicted. >because they could potentially use any number of algorithms to calculate the permutations. They could but they obviously picked one suited for this purpose.
>And it's obvious they're trying to give off the impression that every possible written thing exists up to 3200 characters, as in, that they've already calculated all of it. That's only obvious if you can't read, because from the quote in the OP: >We do not simply generate and store books as they are requested - in fact, the storage demands would make that impossible.
Hudson Clark
A clear ruse. Technically, generate -and- store is correct, but any normal pleb would interpret that as generate -or- store. It's clearly doublespeak, else they would state more clearly that it is generated on the spot.
Nathan Myers
>Every post in this thread was already in the library Spoopy
Easton Murphy
...
Owen Murphy
It wasn't, though. Nothing is in the library that isn't searched for, which is clearly not the spoopy impression they want to give. Just because they have an algorithm that can find what position a certain text would be in were the permutations calculated by some arbitrary algorithm as well as what the surrounding characters would look like, does not mean it already exists. Faggots, I say.
