The Library of Babel

hey what's up everyone its Matt and today I want to show you this website called the library of Babel I have known about this and use this for a while but I'm just making a video on it now I first heard about it from the vsauce video messages for the future that is also a really great video and watch it I'll put a link in the description but so the library of Babel this website is basically inside of it it has it's filled with hexagons and walls and shelves and volumes and books and pages and every single page has something different on it and amid the literally trillions and way more than that actually of combinations in the library you can find every single word sentence phrase spelling and novel that's ever been written said or could ever be conceived and this sounds crazy so let me show you how it works disclaimer if you want to know how mathematically and algorithmically it works you should watch the vsauce video what I'm going to describe right now is kind of like a an easier just way to understand it just conceptually this is how I understand how the library of that will works okay so let's say you start up with a letter string like AAA and we'll run a sort of program or code that increases the value of this by one so the next one would be a a B then a AC a AG AAE AFA gah etcetera etc right until we eventually get to a AZ now when we increase this value by one it becomes a be a after that a b b a b c a b d SP EA b fa b g a whoop sinuses either a BF a BG yeah and then eventually they'll get to you know a BZ and that'll become a CA and eventually this entire string will get to a ZZ which will be B a a is the next and then eventually you know this keeps on going basically until you get to Z Z Z the very last letter in this string and because each letter has or each slot has 26 possible combinations um there are 26 to the third results that we get when we do all of this and you'll notice that when we do all this the mass majority of what we get is just nonsense right like a a a or a a G these aren't words but you do run every single possible combination of three letters you're also going to get every single real word that is three letters wrong like okay Abe is a name not a real word but just by running this combination naturally we're going to get every single real word that is three characters long in addition to mostly nonsense so this is kind of how the library of Babel works except instead of three characters that it's permuting and changing and increasing the value by one it does it with three thousand two hundred and that is what's so crazy and cool about the library of Babel so if you go here and click on search oh actually before that take a look at this so if you hover over it does the exact same number increasing by one algorithm I talked about before or just seconds ago really so you can see once that U is going to eventually get to WXYZ then it's going to be C S II B instead of s e a right so let's watch a term to B and then we'll click search there you go and now it does that exact same thing again now step up something search so look enter up to 3,000 to G characters and we can just type in exactly what I'm saying so we have an understanding of how this works oh also whoops you can write commas spaces and periods in here so that actually gives us 29 possible characters not 26 press enter to search and here we can find that match we can find it by itself like we're looking at right now we can find it within random characters right a bunch of gibberish and then exactly what I said or wrote I guess and we can also find it in random English words a ISO Graham's private I don't know what English word that's supposed to be hanging refits and we can just type in exactly what I'm saying so yeah I like to go into the random characters so we can go to that but so you see right here we're on page 336 of 410 I want to show you how the library is organized so I'm gonna write that down so I can remember it 336 and then you can see here volume 4 page 336 volume 4 shelf 5 well - and then also the very first thing you need to look at before you can get to the walls which then made to the shelves is the hex so this is the hex code for what we're looking at I'm just going to command a and then copy it now let's go back so if we go into browse you can basically just choose any this is how the hexagons are labeled numbers and lowercase letters the combinations of them are how hexes are labeled and you can enter up to 3,000 260 numbers and/or lowercase letters and so if that's numbers and/or lowercase letters I believe that should be 36 to the 3260 which is so many hexes right there are so many hexes which is why if we when you search for letter strings like we did specific ones they're not random gibberish the hexes tend to be really long so this is the length of the hex code we copied right that was I just press command-d and it pasted in there but let's search for that so now it gives us so we're in a hexagon right and now we're gonna our number before it was wall to shelf 5 and volume 1/3 wait for volume 4 so this one and then the page was 336 so I'm going to type in 335 first actually yeah yeah I'll tend 335 and this just looks like any average page that we might have looked at before right but now if you go to the next page you can find exactly what we had said before so these aren't totally randomly created these all exist although butter sequences exist in the library you know there's there's a version of this page that's exactly like this but instead of an L right here that one's an M or instead of an A here this one's an X or instead of this entire these lines here there's the word Barney written over and over and over again because there's just every single possible combination of letters and words of lowercase letters and spaces comment periods of a three thousand two hundred character lengths that exist everything you could put the script of what I'm saying in this video in this library and you'd find it in these houses video message for the future he wrote popularized the word Croatia Slee by using it in a piece off video and found that in there another thing you can do with this library let's just go to a random page and this I think let's go to the beginning again and just go to a really basic hex so let's go to the very first let's go to the very first hex very first wall very first shelf very first volume the very first page see if we can find if there's anything you can actually click English eyes right here to it highlights um what is what it thinks are English words so look at this longest words whist and neons and you can see the word C's in here this one's green because it contains two it contains C and C's where you know this contains the word doy I guess whatever that supposed to mean oh here's whist and neons one of our neons is it's not only important if we find if we find it or not but yeah okay I can't find it oh we could do command app hang on neons oh it's going to be split across the line I bet okay yeah here it is look and because the search didn't find it and II oh I nests okay and you know we could just go to a random page in this let's go to the second one longest word here I don't know any of these words mean anyway the point is you can search for you can use anglicize to search for English words you can also if you go back to the portal you can just what's random to take you to a random page that's kind of cool wait I wonder if I take you to page one of the random book every time let's click on random again okay probably it probably takes you to a random book but then two pages it doesn't randomize any words here croute okay flux um but yeah so you can just there's so many interesting and fun things you can do with a library of Babel you could write your own code in it you could like hide secret messages you could find the text of every Shakespearean play ever written you could also there's you can read about the theory behind it all right Jonathan Basile the designer and I guess artists who made this has written all about it his initial influenced reference text what is this yeah it's basically just explaining what the library is all about why there are hex is why they're in that shape the theory behind it all and yeah why hexagons why hexagons alphabets and irony it's just a really really fun and interesting website so I would definitely recommend you play around with it cuz it's fun cool that's pretty much all I want to show you for right now thanks and I'll see you later

Channel: Everything Else

Views: 175,146

Rating: 4.9104543 out of 5

Keywords: Library of Babel, Vsauce, Messages for the Future

Id: nyYKlLeig7Q

Length: 10min 28sec (628 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 23 2017