7/24/2019 This Digital Library Contains Every Phrase That Could Ever Be Uttered

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This Digital Library Contains EveryPhrase That Could Ever Be Uttered

Inspired by an essay by Jorge Luis Borges, computer programmerJonathan Basile has created a "Library" of Babel

In his 1939 essay, The Total Library, the !rgentine riter Jorge Luis Borges imagined a library that

held not #ust e$ery boo% e$er ritten, but e$ery boo% that could be ritten, e$ery boo%&length

combination of characters in e$ery possible se'uence( It ould contain, along ith an almost infinite

'uantity of gibberish, all of ci$ili)ation*s isdom, true accounts of the past and future, (((my dreams

and half&dreams at dan on !ugust 1+, 193+( It ould be the reification of the infinite mon%ey

thought eperiment, hich posits that enough typing mon%eys ould e$entually reproduce -amlet( .o

perhaps it*s surprising that no one has tried to build one( /ntil no(

The Library of Babel, hich ta%es its name from Borges* famous short story on the same theme,

resides on a des%top computer in the home of Jonathan Basile, in 0ashington, (2( 0hile rereading

Borges, Basile, 3, ho studied 4nglish literature at 2olumbia /ni$ersity, reali)ed that computer

technology as bringing the Total Library ithin reach( .o, despite ha$ing little programming

eperience, he spent si months trying to create it(

-e 'uic%ly disco$ered that the library ould re'uire more digital storage than could fit in the entire

uni$erse( Basile calculated the number of boo%s 5of +1 pages, ith 3,6 characters per page7 as

somehere shy of 1 to the poer of to million( Instead, he settled on a library that eists as an

algorithm, a program that runs hene$er someone plugs in tet at libraryofbabel(info( The programdisplays all of the pages on hich that tet ould appear if the library ere real( The page itself is not

stored but eists as a set of coordinates that ill display the same tet each time(

It #ust may be the most fascinatingly useless in$ention in history( !s Borges foresa, isdom is useless

if it is lost in a sea of nonsense( 8et people still loo% for it( ne obsessed see%er loo%ed for religious

significance in the appearances of the different names of :od( I don*t thin% it has any practical

applications li%e that for finding hidden tet or coded messages, Basile says( In his $ie, the no$elty

of the library is that it treats -amlet*s solilo'uies ith the same statistical indifference as anything

produced by that infinite simian typing pool( !t least one riter recounted laboring o$er a sentence and

then, finally satisfied, entering it into the search engine to disco$er, says Basile, it as there all

along(

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