What is The Library of Babel?
The Library of Babel website is an online project inspired by Jorge Luis Borges' fictional concept. It was created by Jonathan Basile and launched in 2015. The website attempts to simulate the experience of the Library of Babel as described in Borges' story. You can access the website at libraryofbabel.info.
This website contains lots of imaginary "books" made up of random letters and symbols. Each "book" has a unique address like a house with a room number. This website contains every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lower case letters, space, comma, and period. Thus, it would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be - including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on.
At present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 10 to the power 5000 books. For comparison, it is estimated that there may be 10 to the power 80 atoms in the known universe._
You can use a search function on the website to look for specific texts or sentences. If you search for something, the website will try to find a "book" that matches your search.
What's so special about it?
Think of this website as a virtual library that represents all possible knowledge. It's like looking for a specific piece of information in a huge pile of random texts. The website is a fun way to explore the concept of a library with infinite possibilities. _I mean it would be crazy to think that one of the combination could contain the cure to cancer, or how the world turns out in the future and many more.
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Just one of the many wonderful things on the internet!
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