Giulio Pepe edited paragraph_A_library_When_I__.tex  over 8 years ago

Commit id: 54c1ca31206e17923e2913e1abc08a0b3f00159a

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Any random page from a book from such a library would most likely look like a random sequence of characters. In fact, considering space, comma and full stop as separation characters, the expected value for the length of a string of letters is around 9 characters. The chance of finding a 9-character dictionary word in a page at random of the Library of Babel is 1 in 298,625. In comparison, here's the chance of some accidents in the U.S.: 1 in 164,968 to be struck by a lightning and die; 1 in 112 to die from fatal motor vehicle crashes; 1 in 7 to die from cancer or heart disease.  Given how hard it is to find even just a single dictionary word in a page of a book from the library, the odds of finding a full sentence are even slimmer, and the odds of finding a sentence that makes sense even less so and the odds of finding something useful, interesting or new, make the chance of winning the national lottery look like an extremely common event (1 in 175,000,000 in the U.S.). Yet, by the law of large numbers, someone, sometimes, wins the lottery. With enough people browsing the library and with enough time, the chances of finding something useful in it are slightly shifted to our favor. The existence of such \textit{god} in the library is then not such a silly idea. The book mentions the figure of a man every three hexagons, making the population of librarians close to infinite. Yet, for the population of librarians, it would only take 50 years, by reading 4 lines a minute for 10 hours every day, to read the \textbf{entire} Library of Babel. The problem with this is that - given the size of the population - \textit{god} will most likely be not you (like for lotteries), or it would be close to impossible to find, but also. Furthermore. find. Furthermore,  there would be \textit{"pseudo-gods"} that would have read millions of copies of books stating the opposite of the truth or incomplete versions of it.