On 15 November 2014 11:09, Russell Standish <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 08:46:16PM +1300, LizR wrote: > > In case anyone isn't acquainte with the library of Babel, it contains all > > possible books of a particular length (I think it's around 400 pages) > which > > use a certain number of characters, say 30. If we assume there are, say, > > 2000 characters per page, we get (I think) 30 to the power of 800,000 > > books, a large but finite number of the sort I think Daniel Dennett > called > > "Vast" (meaning ridiculously larger than any numbers that could be used > to > > count anything in the observable universe. The LOB would dwarf the > > observable universe). It's similar to Russell's TON in that it contains > > essentially no information - or certainly no *useful* information. As > > Borges mentioned it contains the accurate catalogue of the Library > > (presumably occupying many lightyears of shelves, if assembled in one > > place) together with a "Vast" number of innaccurate catalogues. It also > > Accurate? No it can't. Any complete catalogue of the library will be > vastly larger than any of the books it contains. Each book's entry > must be as large as the book itself. > > Are you saying Borges got it wrong? It was his invention, after all! :-) But maybe he failed to follow the internal logic of the situation he was describing. I assume that a catalogue has to give each book a title, which means compressing information (e.g. there are multiple versions of many Shakespeare plays, each of which could legitimately claim to be the "real" one). So there are, say, a googol books which start "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" - if we treat that as the title, then the concept of a catalogue becomes at least meaningful, although there would have to be a zillion light years of shelves to contain all the locations of the books in question in the library. So maybe he had in mind a "hashing" system that would allow someone to locate one of the googol books which start with a certain string of characters... (Or maybe he just failed to follow the internal logic of the situation he was describing. The guy was a genius, but that doesn't mean he couldn't make mistakes...) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
