Thread: my backup plan

So.. Is this a real thing or a fan with waaay too much time?

Unfortunately for those who liked it, this is in fact a fan with too much time on their hands. I actually made it up, and thought it would make for an interesting little game.

Here is how the website works: 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 104677 books.

So I wasn't lying when I said this had the ending to every videogame stored within… but it also has every single possible fan-fiction ever created (or not) stored within as well.


Alas, the story I linked to you guys was of my design, and not official at all. But if there is one thing to be learned here today, is that until TJ gives us a conclusion, it can be anything we want it to be.


EDIT: It's funny, you almost make it seem like if I had put more thought into Ratchet's name you might have believed it a bit longer

That would be an infinite amount of data stored, would it not? So I imagine it doesn't do exactly that.

It uses mathematical algorithms to generate this vast collection of information. Not all that different from the concept of many videogames like Minecraft and No Man's Sky.

Ooh so the information isn't stored per se, but it's generated as you see it?

Indeed, that is correct. There is still every single possible piece of literature that ever has been or will be in there. 99% of it just has yet to be discovered

That makes a lot of sense. Further question, are you able to add things to the site?

No, you can't add anything to the site at all. You can however look for things: https://libraryofbabel.info/search.html

Oh that makes sense, so you can write something and then search for it, and it has to exist?

Yes, but it does have a character limit. If you take the story I "found" and paste it in the search box you will notice that it has reached the character limit.

Ah that makes sense… Well we got this thread way off topic , but that was really cool! I'll have to look into that some more!

Well they say that if you put some chimps in a room with typewriters for a truly infinite amount of time, they will produce Shakespeare. I guess you could say that this algorithm is our chimp, and we have a finite amount of time to wait. But the best stuff needs to be created, not found.

As for the original topic: I would like to think we could witness a conclusion something like what I posted.

And how long ago did you found that?

It can't have been more than a week ago that I found it.

Thanks for showing us that!

There you go.