How awesome it would be to have a library which contains everything ever written or will be written!
Well, surprisingly, such a library already exists! Its known as The Library of Babel!
Library of Babel is an online website built by Jonathan Basile, that currently offers everything which has been or could be written!
You can search for any 3200 character string and you’ll find that it is already present in one of the books in the library!
It is organized into a hexagon shaped room, each with 4 walls, having 5 shelves with each shelf having 32 volumes of books, each containg 410 pages!
The concept itself was taken from a short story, The Library of Babel, by Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges, which talks about conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set.
The About page of the website says:
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 10^4677 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.
When I found out about the website, I thought it was a fluke or someone might be joking around, but still I was curious, so I checked it out.
So, I clicked on Search and typed the following string, “the rain fell upon makemake and realised that it had no atmosphere”
It returned me few search results. Each result had a title name, page name and a Location(hex name). When I clicked on the location, It took me to a page having that string!
I further clicked on the location(hex name), and it gave me the exact address of the page containg the string!
To cross check that its not generating this string temporarily, I noted down the Hex name, Wall number, Shelf number, Volume number and page number.
Later I went to the home page and clicked on Browse and entered the hex name and pressed enter. It gave 4 me bookshelfs placed in a hexagonal room
I went to Wall : 1, Shelf : 3 and Volume : 2, and opened the Page number : 327, and Voila! My string was there!
It was amazing! :D
Here’s the link to the page containing my string: fczzxvt327
How it works(taken from this video by Michael Stevens from Vsauce):
Each page is given a unique sequential page number in base-10,
The text on each page is encased inside the number 9431.
An algorithm created by Basile uses the page number as a seed to generate a unique big number(base-10), that output is then converted into base-29 so that it can be represented by every letter in English alphabet as well as the coma, space and full stop. Basile has ensured that the algorithm will produce every possible combination and the same page number will create the same output every time!
Which means that, what is on each page, is already predetermined! So, in a way, every page already exists! It only needs to be looked up.
This library is still under progress and once completed it will contain everything! Every future novel, book, scientific paper, joke etc. This is truly enthrilling in itself whenever I think about it and its really eerie to imagine that, whatever I am saying right now, or whatever I am writing right now, has already been written somewhere before!
