Library of Babel (Existential Crisis 1)
Have you ever had one of those moments when your mind struggles to conceive the very reality of the foundation we live in? Of course you have. Every one of us has experienced this existential crisis thing. I have just experienced another one. How do you set apart Invention from Discovery? We are used to “things invented by someone” that didn’t existed before. But what if I tell you that this invention thing is just an illusion. What if everything that can exist, already exits and is merely waiting there to be discovered. Every religious books, every novels, every poems, every quotes, every scientific/non scientific paper, every news that has happened, can happen and will happen sometime in future is already written out there. Just awaiting to be found! What if there is a library of this collection? If everything that can EVER be written or spoken in both past and future is already at the library, you cannot invent anything new any more! You can only discover what is already out there in that library. Some sickhead named Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story of this idea titled “The Library of Bable”. I have not read it. But I got the idea of it. It thought of the universe as collection of books containing combination of every possible character(letter) combination that is ever possible. So in theory if this library exists, every thing you say or write will match one the combination of words contained in that library. And do you have any idea what it means? Everything you say or write is like quoting from a book of that library. Everything you say or write is not your own word. Because it already contained in some book in that library. Its like not having a free will! And you know what? It exits in real life. Yes. Yet again some sickhead decided to use the sheer power of digital computer to generate every possible combination of 3200 character set of english alphabet including space, comma and full stop (period) and store the result as digital books. Everything I have just written of will be writing is contained in some pages of some book in that library. Yeah! go to https://libraryofbabel.info/ and go ahead copy paste this in the search. It will show you which page of which book contains it! Go ahead and search some sentence you think you will say next. It is there. Mind blown right? Think of it this way. Every Noble prize winning novel, poem, research paper that has been written is there. And every future Nobel prize winning novel, poem, research paper that has NOT been written yet by HUMAN is also there. Just waiting there to be discovered. Now that is something I think everyone will have struggle to think about.
N:B: for practical purpose I think combination of 3200 character set including space, comma and full stop (period) is enough to produce a research paper or a poem. So it is safe to say that it is indeed an working library. The library of babel is working currently to include even larger datasets. they have also projects for images! But I am somewhat sceptical about the operation. How do they manage to search large texts this quickly?