Giulio Pepe edited Writing_goes_arm_in_arm__.tex  over 8 years ago

Commit id: 911cf7e9ef5395642a6c072ee5abe145bef278c7

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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, win at 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. That would mean that the populations of librarians would be close to infinite, which would bring a whole new set of problems, but in that universe, for librarians reading 4 lines every minute (underestimating their capabilities and the fact that a page can be almost immediately discarded if full of gibberish), it would only take 50 years, by reading 10 hours every day, for the population to read the \textbf{entirety} of the Library of Babel. The problems for that are that, given the size of the population, \textit{god} will most likely be not you (just like for lotteries), or close-to-impossible to find, but also: there would be \textit{"anti-gods"} that would have read millions of copies of the opposite of the truth or incomplete versions, or the truth could have been in a different language than the librarian's.