Library of Babel (No Man's Sky of language; Understanding Size)

[SickTag]

To help you understand the size, scope and variety, of this game, here is everything you could ever write, think to write, has ever been written, or will ever be written, EVER. You could even find this post word for word and every comment possible that will follow to it as well. Mind blown yet? Doubting it? Check it out, I find it helps me understand the size of NMS

https://youtu.be/GDrBIKOR01c?t=17m1s

[SickTag]

https://libraryofbabel.info/

[asd]

So I'm guessing you're also waiting for the next Vsauce video?
It's worse than HL3 at this point... well not really, but you know

[Sherwatt]

Sir, thank you for this video! I love Vsauce, but haven't seen this one yet. Really amazing!

[SickTag]

I love Vsauce. Pretty aweseom stuff. I wish there were more videos. I also wish people could grasp the concept of what this video is about. It is pretty much anything that could ever be said using the english alphabet, is already out there. Even pages from books not yet written by people not yet born.

The principle is how NMS is made. The planets (pages) are out there, predeterimed, they only have to be looked up.

[Old Gregg]

the wait for a vsauce video is always a struggle. and this video is a mind-blowing one

[Vardis]

There's variety, and then there's meaningful variety. Yeah, the game is big, but that's the sort of thing that happens when you have procedurally generated content. It's more important that the game is fun, not that they add another few zeros to the number of planets that you won't ever see. ;) It's a nice gimmick, certainly, but it doesn't make the game better.

Origineel geplaatst door SickTag:

I love Vsauce. Pretty aweseom stuff. I wish there were more videos. I also wish people could grasp the concept of what this video is about. It is pretty much anything that could ever be said using the english alphabet, is already out there. Even pages from books not yet written by people not yet born.

The principle is how NMS is made. The planets (pages) are out there, predeterimed, they only have to be looked up.

Ehh, but that's not as mind blowing a concept as you're making it out to be. Or at least, it shouldn't be. It's just translating up to 3200 characters of text. Lowercase, space, period, comma included. No hypens, colons, uppercase letters, characters like á, etc.

I mean, have you actually looked at the name of the "book" that results from a search? It's a huge mass of text. It's like you typed in something in English in Google Translate, and it reproduces it in Spanish (or whatever), and then you're acting as if it's already existed in Spanish all this time before you ever typed anything. :)

[SickTag]

It's all predetermined, so it does exist, it just has to be looked up.

[furtzown]

so how is that https://libraryofbabel.info/book.cgi?5-w1-s4-v08:1 supposed to be interesting?

[TenaciousTom]

On occasion humans do/come up with some pretty incredible things.

https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?cjfayrhvlfccmbasfdqfe.rrqb36

[furtzown]

Origineel geplaatst door TenaciousTom:

On occasion humans do/come up with some pretty incredible things.

https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?cjfayrhvlfccmbasfdqfe.rrqb36

how the ♥♥♥♥ lol... ok now im impressed

[Rockin' Shawn]

As impressive as the LoB is (and it certainly is!)...the human mind is just not able to grasp the size of NMS, the LoB or even our own galaxy. That's why for example lightyears were introduced - it's a crutch to help us understand the sheer size of our galaxy and the universe as a whole. But still...our brains are just not capable of *really* understanding such a huge scale. Not even physicists are. It's just beyond anything we can truly *process* ;)

Still...a helpful thread :)

[contentwh0re]

Origineel geplaatst door SickTag:

It's all predetermined, so it does exist, it just has to be looked up.

it has only been predermined based off characters that already exist currently. If Introduced a NEW character, one nobody has ever thought of, let's say it looks like a half circle with a line point to 2 oclock and a dot on the end of it. ANd it sounds like "ggosug" this libarary will have to add it into the algo.

so its not anything especially mind blowing or "predetermined" in the sense that everyone is getting at like its something special. you're just cataloging all the different ways that it can present known characters in a specific order.


and there is also a big difference between a digital "libaray" saying "I have a dream" and a human saying it infront of a crowd of people.

[furtzown]

please prove me wrong, but i just thought of something that would make this website bs. imagine that you search a 100 character sentence... you sould logically find an almost infinite number of book/page countaining this one sentence since this sentence could continue and evolve in an almost infinite possibility until 3200 character. yet when i tried yesterday with a few small sentence, it would only find 1 result everytime.
my guess would be that it just create a new random book everytime a research is done which include the sentence you wrote
and here i am writting this while i should be studying...

[Vardis]

Origineel geplaatst door furtzown:

please prove me wrong, but i just thought of something that would make this website bs. imagine that you search a 100 character sentence... you sould logically find an almost infinite number of book/page countaining this one sentence since this sentence could continue and evolve in an almost infinite possibility until 3200 character. yet when i tried yesterday with a few small sentence, it would only find 1 result everytime.
my guess would be that it just create a new random book everytime a research is done which include the sentence you wrote
and here i am writting this while i should be studying...

It doesn't create a random book each time. Look at the full book string. It's huge. That's because it's encoded the entire page into a smaller string of text that then is split up into the book, page, section, etc.

The search just gives you the results of what you type, plus additional characters to fill out the max text size. It starts with your text at the top of a page with only spaces after it, then gives you other permutations. I would imagine that it randomly fills in the rest of the text, then translates that to give you the book "location". That would make more sense than actually searching for anything.

[SickTag]

The same principle behind the site is behind the 18 quitilion planets of No Man's Sky. It's there, though it is not there when you are not there and it renders it out when you search for it, or in NMS you arrive. It's predetermined like if you leave a solar system, and come backit is still there, same with the books in this. You can actually just browse and come across the same book everytime that says what you say.