[HN Gopher] Borges: The Library of Babel [pdf] ___________________________________________________________________ Borges: The Library of Babel [pdf] Author : ColinWright Score : 139 points Date : 2021-10-04 09:17 UTC (2 days ago) (HTM) web link (sites.evergreen.edu) (TXT) w3m dump (sites.evergreen.edu) | benrockwood wrote: | Borges is the best author most people have never heard of. His | stories are mind bending and he's an amazing human being. You can | listen to him giving lectures on verse here, his voice is | hypnotic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSLV7t9DvN8 | narcraft wrote: | Can someone please help me? I'm trying to recall a post on HN | within the past year that ended up introducing me to The Library | of Babel. It was like a textual/visual blog post/article either | in the same vein as The Library or direct text from it...or maybe | the images were originally meant to illustrate it. It was weird. | That's all I can remember. | ColinWright wrote: | Have you tried a search? | | https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... | | Does that show up what you're looking for? | narcraft wrote: | Thank you, but no luck. I don't think the post had any | explicit references. Could've sworn someone must've mentioned | it in the comments because how else would I end up on the | Library of Babel wikipedia page? | dpflan wrote: | Many great stories to chose from: I found the _Lottery of | Babylon_ to be a great story on randomness in life: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery_in_Babylon | GabrieleR wrote: | such an odissey! huge fan here | willsoon wrote: | Like many other Borges' stories they reach a point where it is | no other thing but a different way to tell about the world. The | Lottery finds that deliver money it's not enough, it will | deliver joy, pain, enlightenment, suffering, tragedy and | hapiness too. So one bought a ticket not just to gain some | gold, but to play. | jl6 wrote: | The Lottery in Babylon is the same essential idea as the | Library of Babel. The Lottery becomes so sophisticated, it | becomes indistinguishable from the "random" events of | reality, and therefore is there really any lottery at all? | KingFelix wrote: | He spoke on these topics a lot, similar to how Philip K | Dick asks whats real anyway, using memories etc. | | Borges has another story about a map that becomes | indistinguishable to reality. | | On Exactitude in Science (I believe its this one) | BLKNSLVR wrote: | The map that exactly covers the territory it is mapping. | I love what that little snippet of story does to my | understanding of the 'world in general' (my personal | mental map). | | _... In that empire, the art of Cartography reached such | perfection that the map of a single province occupied the | whole of a city, and the map of th empire took up an | entire province. With time, those exaggerated maps no | longer satisfied, and the Colleges of Cartographers came | up with a map of the empire that had the size of the | empire itself, and coincided with it point by point. Less | addicted to the study of Cartography, succeeding | generations understood that this extended map was | useless, and without compassion, they abandoned it to the | inclemencies of the sun and of the winters. In the | deserts of the west, there remain tattered fragments of | the map, inhabited by animals and beggars; in the whole | country there are no other relics of the geographical | disciplines._ | | The universe could well be a simulation ... of its exact | self. | libraryofbabel wrote: | William Goldbloom Bloch, _The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges | ' Library of Babel_ is a pretty good companion volume by a math | professor, delving into some fun combinations and topology | topics. | grozmovoi wrote: | ah that looks great! Does it go into a possible implementation | of it? I have been toying with the idea of making one but I | lack the training and I'd love some guidance. | fmajid wrote: | I liked the story enough I commissioned a custom bookplate for | myself based on it, by Daniel Mitsui: | | http://www.danielmitsui.com/00_pictures/majid.jpg | | (It's the scene where biblioclasts throw books and even people | down the staircases). | throwaway889900 wrote: | And if you liked this one, there's also the Book of Sand. Similar | theme of infinite, generally useless, and unattainable knowledge. | JoeDaDude wrote: | It's been said that the maze-like library in "The Name of the | Rose" by Umberto Eco was inspired by the Library of Babel. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose#:~:text=T.... | lapetitejort wrote: | The character Jorge of Burgos is also named after Borges. | perihelions wrote: | What's this syntax from? Is there a browser that implements it | as a content-relative anchor? It looks convenient. | #:~:text= | hangtwenty wrote: | In a Chrome browser on desktop, you can right click and "Copy | Link to Highlighted Text". That's the context (hah, pun) | where I know it from. It's really useful! | gus_massa wrote: | It's call "Text Fragments", and it was introduced to Chrome | more than one year ago. https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to- | text-fragment | | I think it works in Chrome and Edge, but not in Firefox. | perihelions wrote: | Thanks! | | Indeed, it seems to be just those for now: | | https://caniuse.com/url-scroll-to-text-fragment | sergius wrote: | My favorite is "The Immortal": | | https://matiane.wordpress.com/2019/10/11/immortal-by-jorge-l... | macando wrote: | _I emerged into a kind of small plaza -- a courtyard might | better describe it. It was surrounded by a single building, of | irregular angles and varying heights. It was to this | heterogeneous building that the many cupolas and columns | belonged. More than any other feature of that incredible | monument, I was arrested by the great antiquity of its | construction. I felt that it had existed before humankind, | before the world itself. Its patent antiquity (though somehow | terrible to the eyes) seemed to accord with the labor of | immortal artificers._ | | Great story. Aleph is amazing as well. | fmlp wrote: | Emergi a una suerte de plazoleta; mejor dicho, de patio. Lo | rodeaba un solo edificio de forma irregular y altura | variable; a ese edificio heterogeneo pertenecian las diversas | cupulas y columnas. Antes que ningun otro rasgo de ese | monumento increible, me suspendio lo antiquisimo de su | fabrica. Senti que era anterior a los hombres, anterior a la | tierra. Esa notoria antiguedad (aunque terrible de algun modo | para los ojos) me parecio adecuada al trabajo de obreros | inmortales. | | Unfortunatelly, that translation failed to capture at least | two keywords in the original: "patio" (courtyard) and | "obreros" (artificers). Both terms have many overtones in the | borgean vocabulary, both have heavy loaded connotations in | his literature and in the Buenos Aires language. | | "Humankind" for "hombres" is strange as well: I don't think | "humanidad" was a borgean term; I do not know if there's a | better way to translate "los hombres" though. | CyanBird wrote: | "Before people" for English carries the same weight, but | yeah humankind is too formal of a term | | I do disagree about the artificers bit, I feel that even | when it is not a transliteration, it does carry the feel of | manual manufacture | [deleted] | GabrieleR wrote: | I have tattooed the alefh itself - not the mitical point, but | the Hebrew letter - becouse of that. Borges brought me to | life throughout my adolescence. Much appreciation from Italy | too, the argentino-ispancio translations to Italian suits | Borges' writings sinuously. | macando wrote: | I learned about Borges and Aleph from a comic. If you're | Italian, you'll know. | | https://i.gr- | assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.... | viebel wrote: | I really like this story. The idea that everything is written | inside one of the books of this library is mind blowing! | jazzyjackson wrote: | More perplexing to me is the notion that such a library | contains no information, owing to this description: | | > each book is unique and irreplaceable, but (since the Library | is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect | facsimiles - books that differ by no more than a single letter, | or comma | | If one were to try and distinguish one book of Shakespeare from | another, they would need the full text they are looking for in | order to be sure they have an accurate copy. essentially your | key length is equal to the content length, and if you have the | key already, the library contains nothing further. | | I consider this as presaging the info-spam of an infinite, bot- | infested internet: as more near misses of actual content is | produced, the internet can contain measurably less information. | jl6 wrote: | To paraphrase The Incredibles: when every book is there, no | book is there. | vokep wrote: | This got me to some interesting thinking. If the library | contains no information because you need the information you | look for, what about the ability of it to at least match to | information you look for? Or put another way, the library | does begin to have information if you have the information | you're looking for. The fact of finding the particular | information is different than the library not containing it. | | I can't seem to figure out how to type this out in a way that | maks sense but basically I'm thinking when an AI like GPT-3 | is working its sort of sorting through the library of babel | and finding words. Or when speaking its as though the library | of babel is at immediate call in the brain, which sorts | through near instantly finding the book that satisfies the | next word. The website that allows browsing the library helps | show what I mean, you can look on it and click random and | search for information in it. The thing itself contains "no | information" but it also does as in this case you may find | something (first page I saw had the word 'beef') | jazzyjackson wrote: | It does take a talented writer to talk about infinity! | | I think maybe there are paths through the library that | would prove useful for browsing, as is the case when I | visit a normal library: I don't always know what I'm | looking for ahead of time, I let the arrangement of books | inspire me, see what books are next to the one's I already | know. | | I think it's kind of like a compression algorithm, you have | the compressed data, and then you have the decoder. Any | complexity the original data had is either in the data, or | in the decoder. The library of babel is a pathological | case: the compressed data is 0 bytes: whatever choices you | make in finding the data is actually information outside of | the system, as in: you might as well be making it up on the | spot. | | However, if the books in the library are ordered somehow, | that is complexity being added back into the compressed | data, and it no longer contains "no information" | Loughla wrote: | The problem is that it does contain everything, and | therefore contains nothing (worth knowing that you don't | already know). | | In other words, you could never find an answer that you | could say, with 100% certainty is accurate, unless you | already knew the answer. You can't ask an unending database | a question that you don't already know the answer to, | because every answer is there. | | Ask it, what is the primary atomic structure of beef? | You'll get answers for anything. They're made of carbon. | They're made of rainstorms. They're not real. You're beef. | | So by saying it doesn't contain information, what they're | really meaning is that it doesn't contain useful | information. You can't do anything with it that doesn't | amount to a wild guess. | ballenf wrote: | Riemann's hypothesis, if true, is proven in an infinite | number of ways in the library. | | But the library also contains an infinite number of flawed | attempted proofs. | fmlp wrote: | And JLB would add: and an infinite number of refutations of | each of that proofs. | ColinWright wrote: | And infinitely many incorrect refutations of each of the | correct proofs. | macando wrote: | _In Borges ' story, the Aleph is a point in space that contains | all other points. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything | in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without | distortion, overlapping, or confusion. The story traces the | theme of infinity found in several of Borges' other works, such | as "The Book of Sand"._ | | Maze is another favorite theme of his. | | _Borges fractalizes the labyrinth, infinitely multiplies the | interconnections between spaces -- but makes all these spaces | identical, cloned pieces of an infinite non-linear repetition, | extending vertiginously into eternity, out in space and deep | into the future, forever onwards._ | chaoticmass wrote: | There is a fun story based off this idea, A Short Stay in Hell by | Steven Peck [0]. In the story the character dies and wakes up in | a kind of hell that is basically a version of the library of | Babel. There are other people there. You're allowed to leave if | you can find the book that has your life story in it. | | [0] https://www.amazon.com/Short-Stay-Hell-Steven- | Peck/dp/098374... | jimothyhalpert7 wrote: | You could also just find a book that tells you another way of | getting out, no? | jl6 wrote: | How would you tell the difference between that book and a | similar book with a plausible but flawed escape plan? | | To paraphrase The Incredibles: when every book is there, no | book is there. | a1369209993 wrote: | How would you tell the difference between a book that has | your life story in it and a similar book with inaccuracies | in all the details you don't remember? | rinnan wrote: | This naturally evolved on my mind to, "Whose (or what) | life are you thinking of when you think of your own?" | [deleted] | JoeDaDude wrote: | I suspect this is obvious to the HN audience, but this work is | nice little exposition on some concepts of Information Theory. I | wonder if Claude Shannon had any thoughts on it. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory | | https://utopiaordystopia.com/tag/claude-shannon-a-mathematic... | staplung wrote: | It's fun to think about all the things that are in the library. | E.g. your exact genome, or the genome of a T. Rex. A hi-def | version of every movie ever made, encoded in a suitable format | that respects the limitations of the allowed "alphabet" (most of | those would look like noise to a reader). A hi-def version of | every movie that _could_ be made. All music. This post. The | entire internet. A description of every event that has ever | occurred. The meaning of life, the universe and everything. | | If gets even more fun when you try to think about transcriptions | of infinitely long things, like the digits of pi. They wouldn't | find in one volume of course but so what? The number of possible | volumes in the library is finite but the digits of pi are not. | optimalsolver wrote: | This is the best audio presentation of The LIbrary Of Babel that | I've ever found: | | https://www.mboxdrive.com/Library_Of_Babel.mp3 | | (Originally from the "Let's Read!" YouTube channel, but since | deleted: https://www.youtube.com/c/LetsReadOfficial) | GabrieleR wrote: | most French version that can be found sounds quite bad | tasty_freeze wrote: | 35+ years ago when AT&T had lost the monopoly on phones and the | market was flooded with various phones and each was trying to | distinguish themselves, a common bragging point was how many | quick dial numbers it could hold. | | I used to joke that I was going to introduce a phone that could | remember 10M 7-digit numbers: just enter the 7-digit index of the | phone number you want to recall. | 101008 wrote: | As a HN reader from Argentina, I thank ColinWright to share this | with the community. Here in Argentina we are very proud of Borges | and his works - and it is always nice to see people from around | the world discovering or revisiting him. | JadeNB wrote: | > As a HN reader from Argentina, I thank ColinWright to share | this with the community. Here in Argentina we are very proud of | Borges and his works - and it is always nice to see people from | around the world discovering or revisiting him. | | Borges and Cortazar taught me anew what literature could be | when I thought it was all the same. They are amazing authors | and reading them is transformative. | pdabbadabba wrote: | Perhaps you already know this, but I can tell you that Borges | is certainly very widely read and admired in the United States. | I'd be proud if he were from my country. | briga wrote: | Are there any other Argentinian writers you know that perhaps | deserve more recognition in the anglosphere? I've read Borges | and Cortazar--both floored me and left a lasting impression, | they make me curious to learn about some of the other great | authors from your country | fmajid wrote: | Adolfo Bioy Casares, who co-wrote books with Borges. And | Borges himself was a fan of Evaristo Carriego. | jedimastert wrote: | I've always enjoyed the idea of the library of babel. Shameless | self-promotion: https://aarontag.dev/2020/12/06/youtube-library- | babel-sectio... | p_j_w wrote: | One of my favorite podcasts, Very Bad Wizards, had an episode | where they discussed this story. Highly recommend. | | https://www.verybadwizards.com/144 | lapetitejort wrote: | Any Fermi Problem-like answers to how large the library would be, | based on how the number of permutations of the books and the size | of each room? Is it an easy guess to say larger than the size of | the universe? | lapetitejort wrote: | According to the story, each book has: | | * 410 pages | | * 40 lines per page | | * 80 characters per line | | * Not included: The characters on the front cover, maybe 15 on | average? | | There are 25 symbols. | | So there are 25^(410*40*80) possible books, which comes out to | ~10^1834097 books. Sufficed to say, the library could hold | numerous universes. | Izikiel43 wrote: | That's most likely an upper limit, as random character | strings are not necessarily language. | GabrieleR wrote: | I'd say every set of whatever is a language. not the | opposite tho | libraryofbabel wrote: | If you read the story you will see that most books present | the appearance of random strings of characters. | jazzyjackson wrote: | If the sets of integers and reals is anything to go by, | an infinitesimal portion of the books would include | something that's actually legible, but perhaps the books | could be sorted so those containing the most sensible | arrangements of letters were kept nearby: don't bother | looking at those noisy tomes of high entropy. | jl6 wrote: | But perhaps the noise is just a language you haven't | recognized? Perhaps the noise contains True information | when decoded using a scheme described in one of the other | books? | jazzyjackson wrote: | O very true... you might start trying out one book as an | XOR key to another. Of course, the result of decryption | will already be sitting on the next shelf over :-) | scarmig wrote: | Infinitesimal is a bit off, here. It's a very, very small | but definitely finite proportion of books that'd be | legible by humans in a human language. | | You don't even need the full set of integers to catalogue | the library, let alone the reals. | jazzyjackson wrote: | What I was trying to say was, since there are an infinite | number of real numbers between each pair of integers, | there would be a similarly infinite number of garbage | text between each pair of legible texts. | | Even though there are an infinite number of integers, | there are an even more infinite number of reals, | rendering the proportion of (integers)/(reals) to be near | 0. | mcguire wrote: | On the contrary, a random character string is meaningful in | _some_ conceivable language. | scarmig wrote: | All you need is a reference to the book that describes | the grammar of that language. | scarmig wrote: | For point of comparison, the maximal amount of information we | could fit into a sphere the size of the observable universe | is ~10^124 bits. | | Someone should offer a public Library of Babel API that | streams these books so folks don't need to store them | individually. | bsanr2 wrote: | Video (game) essayist Jacob Geller did a few videos which | mentioned this work. | | https://youtu.be/MjY8Fp-SCVk https://youtu.be/Zm5Ogh_c0Ig | | They're quite interesting, I think. The abyss really gets him | going. | | And a few more I really like: https://youtu.be/oca8BnDMin4 | https://youtu.be/mexs39y0Imw https://youtu.be/aBBuoD9eL5k | https://youtu.be/Zkv6rVcKKg8 | rezmason wrote: | Someone has done a beautiful audioviz treatment of this story. | | https://vimeo.com/508141139 | | https://jamesvde.com/babel | prvc wrote: | I like Borges, but this is one of his weakest stories. The | mathematical point made is on the trivial side (and most readers | who praise it interpret it as merely making a mathematical | point). It is a bit stronger if read as an implicit critique of | logocentrism or religious textualism, but still falls short of | the best few of his other fictional works. | narcraft wrote: | What are some of his best works? | lalaland1125 wrote: | This story isn't really about mathematics. It's about the human | response. It's about how we humans are pattern seeking | creatures in a world of chaos that create patterns through our | own process of seeking. | [deleted] | te_taniwha wrote: | Borges loved to explore the idea of infinity. Another story of | his, The Garden of Forking Paths, explores the idea of a | multiverse. | | One other interesting tidbit that always intrigued me about | Borges is that he became completely blind while he was the | director of the Argentine National Library. In a strange irony, | it became his own "Library of Babel", in the sense that he had so | much knowledge within reach, but limited capacity to interpret | it. | kongin wrote: | I rather enjoyed the short essay: | https://web.archive.org/web/19970614230544/jubal.westnet.com... | | In my Lovecraftian phase I imagined an infinite winding black | pagoda with brail inscriptions on its walls. If you're very lucky | you would wander up or down until you died of thirst reading | nothing but nonsense. If you weren't you'd find the necronomicon | or worse. Unlike the library the text would not be finite and | there would be no limit to the eldritch horrors you could find | within. | zuminator wrote: | Nice find. That was written by Willard van Orman Quine, the | noted logician/philosopher whose surname was adopted to refer | to computer programs that are designed to output their own | source code. | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing) | Loughla wrote: | I think there's real possibility for a good creeping horror | story in that premise. | gyre007 wrote: | This my most favourite story by miles | pilaf wrote: | Someone implemented the Library of Babel into a website, it even | has a search feature to find a page with any (valid) content you | can give it: | | https://libraryofbabel.info/ | kongin wrote: | Google chrome helpfully asked me if I want to translate Polish | to English. | grozmovoi wrote: | as a pole, I confirm this is polish. | jkeat wrote: | https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?azlsfcsuzjcobmbsdow... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-10-06 23:01 UTC)