Benvenuto nel Poliverso

myrmepropagandist

2 anni fa • •

myrmepropagandist
2 anni fa • •

I think I see through the magic trick of the The Library of Babel a little better now. Not that anything about it is "fake" --just that part of what makes it feel impossible is going to a room and finding a book on a particular shelf feels like a very finite act-- but "every book possible" feels infinite.

Feels.

The hexagons have very long names. It's critical that the books use only lower case letters, otherwise the names would be laughably long. The hexagon names are a more dense encoding.

screenshot from the library of babel site of a hexagon name which is a wall of text using A-Z, a-z, 0-9

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Kofi Loves Efia

in reply to myrmepropagandist • 2 anni fa • •

a long time ago in a semiotics class my professor turned to me and sighed. I'd just said something stupid. They then said "Imagine all possible knowledge everywhere is written down and for simplicity sake let's say it's in ASCII, put every letter and punctuation in series like a long number. Put a period in front of that number. You've now created a decimal which can be thought of as a ratio. (They then made two marks on the chalk board like so ---/------) there it is, happy?"

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myrmepropagandist

Unknown parent • 2 anni fa • •

@bcdavid

The human imagination is finite. The library confronts you with this fact. It feels like it shouldn't be true.
There is a gap between "true infinite" and "finite, but so malignantly enormous, its functionally infinite"

The rooms in the library are identified by codes that use 34 characters a-z and 0-9, approximately 10^4992 room names. To contain the books in the library you only need 10^4674 rooms.

(I'm disappointed they don't match up better-- so as to form a fixed point.)

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Michael Gemar

in reply to myrmepropagandist • 2 anni fa • •

@bcdavid The Library contains every truth in written form, but of course it also contains every lie, and every bit of literal nonsense as well. It’s like static, or a random irrational number. It’s really the antithesis of an actual library.

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Darrin West

in reply to myrmepropagandist • 2 anni fa • •

@bcdavid If you filled the known universe with just neutrons, all touching, you would only need 2^123. Given that atoms are mostly vacuum, that is far more neutrons than actually exist. One couldn’t even record the index to the library using physical matter. (Off to read the article, now)

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myrmepropagandist

in reply to Darrin West • 2 anni fa • •

@obviousdwest @bcdavid

Only 2^123=10633823966279326983230456482242756608 Feels kinda small. But I think reading about the monster group has totally broken my sense for numbers larger than 2^64

@Darrin West

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Sophie Schmieg

in reply to myrmepropagandist • 2 anni fa • •

@obviousdwest @bcdavid for a comparison, secure cryptographic keys starts at 128 bits, i.e. when there are 2^128 possible keys to choose from.

In the neutron example, if you gave every neutron a 128 bit cryptographic key, there'd still be plenty of keys never used. (There would likely be two neutrons with the same key, though)

@Darrin West

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blinkenjim

in reply to myrmepropagandist • 2 anni fa • •

@obviousdwest @bcdavid

One of these days I would like to understand group theory well enough to appreciate the monster group.

@Darrin West

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Barry Goldman

in reply to Darrin West • 2 anni fa • •

@obviousdwest @bcdavid WHAT? 2^123 ~ 10^40... that sounds WAY TOO SMALL. avogadros # is 10^23, i thin sun is 800,000miles x 5000 feet x 30 cm so 10^30 ccs so at least 10^50 atoms right there

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Darrin West

in reply to Barry Goldman • 2 anni fa • •

@barrygoldman1 @bcdavid Thank you. I quoted that from an old memory, and have been using it in conversation. Eddington number is 10^80. So the real number might be 10^123 (couldn’t find a current reference). Every 3 decimal orders of magnitude is 10 binary orders of magnitude. So 2^410 is the number I should have used. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edding…

number of protons in the observable universe

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

@Barry Goldman

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myrmepropagandist

in reply to Darrin West • 2 anni fa • •

@obviousdwest @barrygoldman1 @bcdavid

I thought I was losing my sense for big numbers for a bit there!

@Barry Goldman @Darrin West

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Darrin West

in reply to myrmepropagandist • 2 anni fa • •

@bcdavid @barrygoldman1 410 bits is only 50 bytes (less than the width of a screen). To uniquely number any possible neuron position. Big numbers are big, compared to the entire universe.

@Barry Goldman

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