14 KiB
[BST] Exploiting the Library of Babel
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Author: u/None *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3h5e7m/bst_exploiting_the_library_of_babel/
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Score: 6
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Created: 2015-08-16T00:02:37
Post:
The Library of Babel is a short story by J.L. Borges, which you can read (with some discussion) here. The general gist is that there's a library, and it contains all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set – for the sake of this conversation, this includes the English alphabet, the comma, the space, and the period.
Obviously, the vast majority of these texts are gibberish, but every story containable in 410 pages or less is inside there, including flawless descriptions of both the past and the future. (Also, lots of math.) There is no apparent organization to the order in which the books appear on the shelves.
In the original story, there's a religion of librarians who burn nonsense books in search for the Index, since, given there are all possible books, one must be an index of the library. But I think we can do better.
Say that you are planted in the Library of Babel with an arbitrary number of assistants. How can you make the most of this scenario?
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+9] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)
In the original story, there's a religion of librarians who burn nonsense books in search for the Index, since, given there are all possible books, one must be an index of the library.
But ... there are also some finite number of false indices. So how does that help?
u/None [+5] (an hour later)
It doesn't claim to be rationalist fiction. They also think there's someone who's found and read the index, and they call him the Man of the Book and are always searching for him. It's a very entertaining short story, and it has some good ideas, but yeah. Not rational, not really, not yet.
u/ulyssessword [+4] (a day later)
I just thought of this, but is an index even possible in theory? Normal indexes work by using a small amount of information (such as the fact that a book was the 7983th one published in 2015 in the United States) to point to a large amount of information (the content of the book).
With the Library of Babel, there is no small amount of information that can point to a specific volume.
u/None [+1] (2 days later)
Unless there's a pattern ...
u/ulyssessword [+14] (28 minutes later)
given there are all possible books,
For clarification, there's a book with aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa throughout it, a book with aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...aaaaaaaaaaaaaaab, a book with aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...aaaaaaaaaaaaaaac, and so on until every possible combination of letters (and punctuation) is exhausted?
If so, the fact that it contains every possible string means that it doesn't contain any useful information. It is exactly as likely that you would find "one plus one equals two" compared to "one plus one equals ten", as they are both 23 character long strings, and the library contains every possible book.
For a different tack, let's say that there are 40 characters available, and 2440 characters per page (~500 words), making each book 1 million characters long. That's 40^1000000 possible books, or 10^1602060 books. You now have access to countless universes worth of building material and fuel for fires.
u/None [+4] (37 minutes later)
You now have access to countless universes worth of building material and fuel for fires.
That's rather what I was thinking. Entropy is close enough to taken care of, since we have a nigh-infinite supply of combustible books and shelves.
u/PeridexisErrant [+2] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (5 hours later)
Problem: the actual energy density and extraction cost of books from the Library make this impractical beyond a fairly small scale - maybe you could power a city for a few months or a town for a few years, but no more.
Alternative problem: depending on how the structure etc. works, offgassing, decomposition, or (god forbid) combustion byproducts - gasses or heat - could quickly ruin any planet the Library connected to, given it's near-infinite extent.
u/Chronophilia [+2] sci-fi ≠ futurology (9 hours later)
For a different tack, let's say that there are 40 characters available
There are canonically 25 characters: 22 letters (I don't know why 22), the space, comma, and full stop. Just clarifying.
u/None [+1] (2 days later)
I suppose the 22 might come from the original Hebrew or Phoenician alphabets, but I really have no idea.
u/Transfuturist [+5] Carthago delenda est. (an hour later)
There are two stories on FiMFiction inspired by the Library of Babel: Twilight's Library and The Library of Discord.
u/None [+2] (an hour later)
Will take a look; thank you!
u/-Chinchillax- [+3] Librarian of Babel (5 hours later)
Author of The Library of Discord here. If you do want to read it and you're a fan of audiobooks I'd recommend downloading the audio version.
I'd also recommend reading "A Short Stay in Hell," it's not rationalist but it is a good exploration of the library and the concept of the duration of infinity.
Now, onto your question. The first thing to do with a library of Babel would be to clean the data: remove the books that are not necessary. At the very least every book needs to be spell checked. The way the libraries are arranged for my book(s?) is as follows:
Library of Babel: Sheer combination of every letter of every book.
Library of Discord: A Library of Babel that has been spell checked.
Library of Understanding: A Library of Discord that has been filtered so that all the grammar of all the books makes sense. These are books that pass a Microsoft word "spell and grammar" check, and have stories that make some amount of sense.
(This is the Library I had in mind for when I wrote the Library of Discord, however I didn't know the math for how to know the size of that library, but I do now.)
Library of Accord: A Library of Understanding (or Discord) that has been sorted and curated by a sentient being (be it an AI or some other creature) that is capable of living for durations of time that can only be truly explained with up arrow notation. It's a library that has taken nigh infinite time to find and experiment to know that those are the books that are actually correct.
To truly harness the power of the library of Babel you would need a single person/AI/creature that has read all the books in the library and can give you the one that works for your situation.
u/Sagebrysh [+5] Rank 7 Pragmatist (a day later)
The initial library itself is a N=NP problem. You have an infinite amount of data, but no way to quickly verify the veracity of that data. The teleportation book might look good but until you build the machine it describes, you won't know if it works or not, so its almost impossible to use the library to learn anything new. You can easily check books against your regular pool of knowledge, but you can't use the books to gain knowledge without a way to discard the stuff thats 'wrong'
The digits of PI might have the entirety of shakespeare encoded in binary, but good luck finding it.
u/Jiro_T [+5] (a day later)
The library is useless for book-reading purposes, because searching for a book in this library is equivalent to writing the book yourself.
Even having a correct index doesn't help you. We like to think of indexes as containing short descriptions like "shelf 23 aisle 6" but this won't work--the only index listing that could distinguish a 100,000 character book from all the other combinations of 100,000 characters would itself be 100,000 characters long on the average. Each entry in the index would basically be the book.
u/darkflagrance [+10] (22 minutes later)
At least one person has attempted to generate the Library, which is theoretically possible given modern technology. Link:https://libraryofbabel.info/book.cgi?08-w3-s3-v08:1
In any case, consider that for every text that coherently communicates an idea in the Library, a text will be generated that completely contradicts it. Even if a text expresses something that seems true, it might nonetheless be wrong in a few minor, yet crucial details. The only way to confirm or deny the truth of any book would be to test the idea communicated within, which makes the library either redundant (because you'd have to put effort into acquiring the truth for yourself, so why use the library?) or useless (in the case of untestable ideas).
Let's be charitable, and assume we are given a work that somehow communicates the location of 410 pages worth of truth-texts by encoding for each of their locations with each letter, and a companion work that provides the key to working out the location of each truth-text in the guide. You'll probably still never find those truth-texts, for there are more books in the library than there are atoms in the universe. (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2006/03/how-big-is-the-library-of-babel/). It might take you a ridiculous amount of time to travel to these books, if you start from a random location in the library.
This doesn't go into how we would test whether such a guide to reference tomes in the library, assuming we possessed one. Let's say we find the first three works in the guide, and confirm that they are indeed truth-tomes. This doesn't assure us about whether any of the subsequent tomes are worth searching for, or merely gibberish or maliciously wrong in some subtle area.
The information in the library itself is useless. On the other hand, the nature of the library's universe would imply all kinds of strange things about the reality in which it exists - perhaps those oddities could instead be exploited.
u/None [+5] (23 minutes later)
the nature of the library's universe would imply all kinds of strange things about the reality in which it exists - perhaps those oddities could instead be exploited
Ssssounds rather good to me.
On that note, thanks for the link to the autogenerator! That's gonna be quite useful for the story I'm writing.
u/gbear605 [+3] history’s greatest story (20 hours later)
The library wouldn't be redundant because of P = NP (it's easier to check something than to create that thing), but it still requires an essentially infinite amount of time to find the books you're actually looking for.
In much the same way you could make a machine for solving mathematical proofs that tries out every possible proof and then checks them, but it's not feasible.
u/DCarrier [+7] (7 hours later)
I disagree philosophically with that. The library does not contain every book. Quite the opposite. It doesn't contain any books. It contains bound sets of paper with ink stains on them, but that does not make a book. A book is made of information. And the library of babel contains nothing but entropy. Sure there's a "book" that flawlessly details the past and future, but there's no real information there. No letter in it tells you anything about any other.
Someone can find a "book", and if they do it becomes a book. It has information because they made it so. They did not find the book. They wrote it. I'd write it the regular way. That's easier.
u/Chronophilia [+2] sci-fi ≠ futurology (9 hours later)
Treating the Library of Babel as the mathematical thought-experiment which it is... what order are the books in?
u/MugaSofer [+2] (13 hours later)
It's implied they are in some random order.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (16 hours later)
I guess that would be step one then, if you wanted to use the books as books rather than as a physical resource; try to figure out whether the order is truly random or if there's some pattern to it. If there is a pattern, then you can move on from there.
u/MugaSofer [+2] (13 hours later)
Since it is both significantly larger than, and contains much more usable fuel than, the visible universe; I'd suggest me move in and form nomadic tribes of book-burners. I bet with enough work, you could get essentially-empty books to serve most of your needs; pulped as fertilizer, cut up and remade into clothing, used as building material ... heck, you could even write in them and use them as books.
And that's without even getting into the question of the shelves, the building materials of the Library itself; or whatever space-warping magic is required to maintain it; or what powers it.
We don't need to send many in; until Singularity, their descendants will long outlive the humans of this universe.
EDIT: there's also the question on the lighting, come to think; and the air-conditioning. Both are presumably infinite, or at least vast, sources of energy if you can figure them out.
u/SpeakKindly [+2] (2 days later)
It's an excellent source of truly random information. For instance, you could use any given book (or sequence of books) in the library as a perfectly secure one-time pad.
I think "as a source of randomness" is the best you can do by looking at the contents of the books. Even if you find a particular book that contains text you like, searching for that book probably took more time than writing it yourself would.
On the other hand, living in a practically infinite climate-controlled setting with a practically unlimited supply of organic material has its advantages.