From LifeHacker, October 18:
So I figured if I find the cure for cancer, I’ll make a lot of money. I don’t have time to “study oncology” or “learn how anything works,” but I like money, and I have a shortcut: The Library of Babel. If there’s a cure for cancer, it’s already written there, and it’s only a few clicks away, waiting for me to discover it.
This website, the work of Brooklyn author and coder Jonathan Basile, makes the bold claim that it contains every page of up to 3200 characters that has ever been written, every page that ever will be written, and every page that could ever possibly be written. That means that within its virtual shelves lie the answers to all of the universe’s mysteries: The true identity of the Zodiac Killer, the winner of every upcoming Super Bowl, and the cure for cancer—which I’m going to find. So I can make a lot money.
How does it work?
I’m not going to pretend I fully understand the math and programming behind it, but within the Library of Babel, every possible permutation of 3200 letters, spaces, and commas and periods is said to be accessible, right now, in one of the library’s “books.” Search literally anything you can think of—cut and paste this paragraph, type in your next as-yet-untweeted tweet, type random gibberish—and you’ll find it already exists somewhere in the Library. It was already there, if only you’d known where to look.
The Library doesn’t create and save nigh-infinite combinations randomly generated collections of letters and punctuation—there isn’t nearly enough hard-drive space on the planet to do that. Instead, it uses a “pseudo-random number generating algorithm to produce the books in a seemingly random distribution, without needing to store anything on disk.”
It’s like the seeds that Minecraft uses to generate “random” worlds: Put in the right seed, and anyone can locate any possible page, which exists in the same place for everyone. (Check this out for a more in depth look at the secret sauce behind the site.)
Searching for the cure for cancer
The first challenge-tunity (that’s what I call “problems” because I am a positive thinker) in my quest for a cancer cure is that I don’t know where in the library to find the book that contains the cure for cancer. Still, somewhere on one of its many shelves, the page is waiting. I can feel it.
Like the imaginary universal library in Jorge Luis Borges short story “The Library of Babel” that inspired the site, the Library’s content is divided into numbered hexagonal “rooms” (not that they actually exist, they exist in theory, as an function of how the data is sorted, which amounts to basically the same thing). Each room has four walls, 20 shelves, and 640 volumes. You can enter a hex-room and pull a book off a shelf at random, but nothing is organized by subject.....
....MUCH MORE
As far as information storage and retrieval go, I am still dumbstruck by the fact that two very different approaches are to be found in the same city. From May 2021's "Information Infrastructure: The Filing Cabinet":
I admit it. I get a bit obsessive with information storage and retrieval. As noted in an April 2020 post:
This is a couple months old but if I don't post it now it may not re-emerge from the link-vault in my lifetime.
(filing systems: very important you remember how things were indexed and cross-indexed)**You may think of your filing system as a thing of beauty:
When it has actually morphed, without your noticing, into something like this:
And today's story from Places Journal, May 2021:
The filing cabinet was critical to the information infrastructure of the 20th-century. Like most infrastructure, it was usually overlooked.
....MUCH MORE
