The Canvas of Babel

Corrections: 0:00 To be extra extra clear The Library of Babel Website DOES NOT LITERALLY "CONTAIN" AS IN "STORE" EVERYTHING somewhere but it does have the potential to generate everything given enough time, which is nearly indistinguishable to searching through a theoretical library that does have everything stored physically. 4:40 There are not 10^4677 books there are 10^4677 possible pages. From the website: "It contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 10^4677 books" 7:15 I forgot to mention it is all 8 note 12 beat meldoies. 10:31 The time to complete its sort is O(N) to infinity since it requires some amount of time to shuffle once even if it seems instant to us. Sorry. Philosophically the concept described in this video is sound, but there are some details that can cause problems (some which just come down to interpretations of certain word choices) with some of the claims made in this video concerning the mechanics of the websites themselves. One such example is this post on the subreddit for the library of babel. www.reddit.com/r/BabelForum/comments/vph7p3/a_long…

Imagine scrolling through the slideshow of the image library of babel and then just finding a picture of you literally as you are sat there staring at the screen

Don't forget that every frame of this video is also contained inside the library of babel

This feels like the setup to a creepypasta, where the protagonist does stumble across something meaningful, but horrifying (like a photo of his death or something).

Waiting for art to appear on babel is like waiting for life to spontaneously start existing

Imagine procrastinating doing your 3-page paper assignment, scrolling through the library and then you find a perfect match to the assignment within one of the books and just turning that in.

I think from a standpoint it's really telling that a website full of every possible way to make art is practically useless because it doesn't have an aim. Art is truly filled by necessity of the artist

Can't wait until someone does "Bad Apple but in the canvas of Babel"

Every once in a while I take a selfie or some other random picture of something I own and then search it on the canvas of Babel. It’s pretty trippy to draw a picture, take a picture of yourself with the picture, and find it already existed somewhere somehow

He really used Bloons TD music when talking about the infinite monkey theorem. I should be mad, but I am entertained.

i feel the need to point out that searching for the “secret to immortality” in these libraries isn’t just pointless because the chance of finding something coherent is so small, but because there isn’t a filter for truth. these libraries contain secrets, yes, but they don’t know anything. even with a hypothetical coherency filter, you will come across a million lies before you ever find the truth, and you have no way of telling them apart.

“When speaking in infinities, ‘unlikely’ is just certainty waiting for its turn.” -Narrator guy from In space with Markiplier

the bloons music starting the second you started talking about monkeys was a stroke of genius

Ok so now imagine: The kitchen of Babel. It contains every flavor, that could ever be made. And it resides in the Palace of Babel. A palace with every single room that could ever exist, these rooms having every single concept that could ever be made.

Also does this mean that the Canvas of Babel owns every NFT to a specific resolution? Technically it existed at the start of time as the properties of space, it is weird when the rights to something is claimed between two parts of one object

It’s crazy how it could just go from gibberish to the most profound image you’ve ever seen in a second and then back to gibberish.

I feel like the thing about the library of babel is not that it takes too long to get a meaningful text, but let’s say to find out how to become immortal, there will be many books which tell you how to become immortal, but only one will be correct, and the others will tell you to eat dirt and piss from the window. You would already have to know how to become immortal to be able to say that this book says the truth. When there is no real information given into something, you can’t get any out of it.

It has the same vibes as "I know every phone number, just don't know which person it belongs to"

The first time I encountered this concept was actually on the never-ending story book(which the film is based on) in which people who forgot how to tell stories throw dices with random letters in order until they get something sensible, and their caretaker explains that at some point they would get every story, every combination of words possible, which is why they keep playing. It kind of speaks to that Idea of art existing with meaning inherently, otherwise it's just an simulation of it, and I always found that particular scene very harrowing (the book's context helps, but on its own its something that always stuck with me)

I love this concept. I thought about it a few days. There was a Steve Brunton video that showed a 20x20 1 bit image... Having more information than the universe. so I thought about writing a pixel shader to go through all of them. It would require a random bit shift register to never show an image twice. Yes, 2^400 is a massive number. And image space is vast. The key is to create a subset of this space by semantically structuring. Which now exists in plenty of languages models, image decoders etc.