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The library of babel, a website that contains everything that has ever been written or said as well as everything that ever will be written or said.
No not exactly. There is no randomness involved in the generation of the text at that page at all. Though you are somewhat correct in that it "doesnt contain anything".. .the actual text are not stored in its entierty on the server. But the text in any one book is predefined and will always have the same text.
@freemo It's a pseudo random number generator, so sure not truly random, but theoretically it's no better, and worse than a simple counter. It also has a stupid magic trick that generates a seed for you based on input text, very clever, still useless. You'll never find anything there that you haven't input yourself, and yet to dig out this simple truth you have to go trough a wall of text after a wall of text of pretentious mumbo-jumbo.
No thats incorrect, it is not a psudorandom number generator. If it were it wouldnt work in the bidirectional way that it does.
Though you are correct that it is just a silly toy, and a magic trick. Its not doing anything special or revolutionary. It is a fun thought experiment and not much more...
But no, it is **not** a random number generator, the way it works is not simply generating random text as you go through the books, the process it uses is a bit more complicated than that. I wouldnt mind explaining how it actually works if your interested though.
Also yes you can find tons of content you never input yourself. In fact once you know how it works in theory you could take a phrase and write it on a piece of paper and calculate exactly where in the library that phrase would be, got to the website without ever entering the text and go to the location you calculated and you will find the text there, despite never having submitted the text to the site.
@freemo You can argue the meaning of the term PRNG with the creator of the website if you are so inclined, to me it seems fitting both for the purpose and the specific realization, and that's not my point.
In theory you can do everything a computer does on a piece of paper (who would have known! computers demystified! what an incredible discovery!), but that doesn't change the meaning of the algorithm, and what is considered its input and its output.
I think your missing the point. It isnt a random number generator, there is literally nothing random about it. It is a type of compression where the locationa nd page of the book is the compressed input and the output is the data on the page. As such it need not store the data on the site itself, but it also isnt at all what you said earlier "You'll never find anything there that you haven't input yourself".
I understand why you might call it a random number generator in the sense that you could use it to generate pseudorandom numbers. what I am trying to say though is that it isn't the best description because it has properties random number generators do not.
So thinking of it as simply a random number generator, is not the full picture is what im saying, though it is one interpretation you can use. for example if I gave you an ordinary random number generator, like the one you find in software, where it takes a seed and spits out random data, you couldn't use that to replicate the library of babel site because it is not reversible, there is no way to ask for the seed that will give a certain output.
Thats why thinking of it as compression is more valid because compression is a bidirectional process and ideally compressed data is indistinguishable from a pseudo random stream, so overall it fits the picture better. With compression every combination of input text will produce a **unique** identifier that is its compressed data, and in this case represents the location in the library, so its encoded as digits. So when you look up a page the numbers you enter are the compressed data and it decompresses into the seemingly random page of data.
The important part in all this is that unlike a PRNG this is a bidirectional process.
@freemo Again, you are arguing with the creator not me, as in that very website it is described as a reversible PRNG (or invertible to be exact). The only (and the definitive) thing random about PRNGs is that their output is meant to appear random, which is exactly the goal of this website as well. The parallel with compression maybe curious, but the whole thing is even more pointless from that perspective.
I'm not trying to "argue" with anyone. I am just clarifying how it works.
@freemo "reversible PRNG" is the most clear and concise description, according to the author and rephrased by me in my first reply. You did not clarify anything further, not that I'm asking you to.
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@freemo *second reply @theamazingweb @General
@freemo It doesn't contain anything, it generates random garbage on request. It's no more everything than nothing is. Typical software marketing... re
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