[HN Gopher] Borges: The Library of Babel [pdf]
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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...
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(page generated 2021-10-06 23:01 UTC)