A complete list of every combination of characters, ever.

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A complete list of every combination of characters, ever.

Postby OrwellianSouffle » Thu Feb 25, 2016 7:13 am

This website http://libraryofbabel.info/ contains literally all possible combination of characters possible.

From the website,
"If completed, it would contain 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 104677 books."

Here is the creator explaining how it works, https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeau ... nation_of/
"When I started out I didn't know much about programming, so I just generated 410-page text documents and read from those documents to get the text whenever people made page requests from the web site.
The problem with that approach is that each document is about 1 MB, and creating enough to cover all possibilities would require more storage space than exists in all the computers on earth. In fact, it would require more atoms than there are in the universe."

And finally, here is this exact post randomly generated on that website,
Image


http://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?veyudy,nmjgb275
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Last edited by OrwellianSouffle on Thu Feb 25, 2016 7:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: A complete list of every combination of characters, ever

Postby Windy » Thu Feb 25, 2016 7:30 am

Wouldn't this mimic the exact same thing?

1. Take the input and display it on the middle of the screen
2. Insert randomly generated strings above and below it based on the input
3. Randomly choose a page number based on the input
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Re: A complete list of every combination of characters, ever

Postby OrwellianSouffle » Thu Feb 25, 2016 7:44 am

Windy wrote:Wouldn't this mimic the exact same thing?

1. Take the input and display it on the middle of the screen
2. Insert randomly generated strings above and below it based on the input
3. Randomly choose a page number based on the input


I didn't think of that but that seems vastly easier than what the site does, heh maybe he lied :lol:.
Still there is the browse function and he explains the working of the site in detail.


Edit: Also there is this, https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeau ... of/crjmwpr

https://babelia.libraryofbabel.info/imagesearch.html , contains the "code" of every possible image under a certain size.
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Re: A complete list of every combination of characters, ever

Postby Absentia » Fri Feb 26, 2016 8:59 am

If I'm understanding him correctly, what this actually is is a pseudo-random text generator that generates 410 pages of text by running a (ridiculously large) seed number through an algorithm. Everything is procedurally generated with that algorithm instead of being stored statically on the site (which would be impossible).

The trick is that the algorithm can be run in reverse to find seed values that would result in a particular string being spit out as part of the output; you search for "to be or not to be, that is the question", the program finds a seed number that would create that string and runs that number through the algorithm to get the full book of mostly nonsense plus one line of Shakespeare.

So it's not exactly accurate to say that the site contains all possible combinations of characters, because at any given moment it only contains what people are browsing at the time. It's more of an "infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters" simulator.
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Re: A complete list of every combination of characters, ever

Postby CarrieVS » Fri Feb 26, 2016 10:55 am

Nobody say 'monkey'.
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Re: A complete list of every combination of characters, ever

Postby El Saico » Fri Feb 26, 2016 2:38 pm

CarrieVS wrote:Nobody say 'monkey'.

Ook!
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