@erskyscot
The log at the beginning made me think this was an SCP wiki entry
@DoubtfireClub
He talked mostly about gibberish books but you would also have an infinite number of cohesive books that were full of false conclusions.
@unvergebeneid
This concept comes from a time when we thought access to information was everything. Now we know that information is worthless if you can't tell it from noise.
@albizu75
"It was the best of times. It was the blurst of times..." For the content of this comment, please see page 98 of volume DS9 88xA51^42. Another excellent Thursday morning with Isaac Arthur! Excellent video!
@m4rkurius773
Last time I was this early, the Library of Alexandria wasn't yet burnt
@iamfade8784
Can't remember where I heard this one "I know every persons phone number, I just don't know who they belong to."
@-41337
I wish you would talk about and explain Assembly Theory. It helped me see why we don't see any Boltzmann brains, but why we do see brains. And monkeys that fill the universe can't write novels, but there are millions of novels written on Earth. I haven't seen any science communicators pontificate about Assembly Theory.
@crypticnomad
The first time I remember hearing about the Library of Babel was around 2015, shortly after the Babel text and image archives went live. It piqued my curiosity back then but quickly got relegated to the "interesting stuff" directory. Then, several years later, I was watching Rick and Morty with my youngest nephew, and the episode featured "interdimensional TV." This immediately reminded me of the Babel image archives. Ever since, I've intermittently thought about how to potentially implement something like that in real life. Of course, a real implementation would likely differ from what was shown on Rick and Morty, but I actually think something similar could be possible in the not-so-distant future. I have some unreleased academic work I’m tentatively calling "Symmetry as the Symbolic Root." In this work, I explored several different symbolic systems, such as Boolean logic, propositional logic, and probability theory, and noticed the emergence of the same sort of pattern across them. This led me back to thinking about the image version of the Library of Babel. At the end of the day, we use a system of symbols to represent a pixel on a screen. The typical format used in current digital systems is often 32 bits, meaning 32 ones and zeros, with 8 bits representing the alpha channel, 8 for red, 8 for blue, and 8 for green. Fairly recently, a paper titled The Platonic Representation Hypothesis showed how different machine learning algorithms from different modalities, such as image and text, can converge on the same internal representation. This suggests that a text description and an image could potentially share the same internal representation. The next relevant concept for implementing a "meaningful" Babel Library could be quantization. For example, the Facebook audio library Encodec uses specific sampling rates to represent 320 32-bit float values as just 8x11-bit integers for a single audio channel. Another key idea is document embeddings, where entire documents—such as text or images—are embedded into the same space as individual tokens (words, in the case of text). Typically, this embedding space has around 512 dimensions. Studies have shown that we can reconstruct the original document from the token embeddings and document embedding with very high accuracy. All of this suggests a potential method for searching a "meaningful" version of the Babel text or image library. First, build token embeddings, then document embeddings, and finally quantize the document embeddings. This would allow us to search a drastically reduced combinatorial space. For instance, searching across all combinations of 256x256-pixel images, where each pixel is a combination of 4 different 8-bit values, results in a space that is computationally prohibitive to search. However, using "semantic compression," similar items with similar meanings would tend to cluster together, allowing us to efficiently search the space.
@danielfincher8439
Wait, you managed to put it in perspective for me. This library actually contains a well-written season 8 of the show!
@rexy_mirror1225
I wonder if there's a Restaurant of Babel 🤔
@MetricZero
The Library of Babel is one of my favorites.
@ClintSprayberry
Dude thank you for continuing to do this show episode after episode. I've been a big fan for several years now (my how time flies 😮) and with each episode I feel those sensations of wonder that, to be honest, aren't kindled by the surrounding world as much as when I was a child. So thank you man! You literally renew my love for life with this video series/channel/the new form of entertainment 😀
@detritusofseattle
Reminds me of a power I gave one of my characters. He is the reincarnation of a "Librarian" in Metatron's library. It is a place on the border between the astral and spiritual planes, a place where those who seek knowledge may find answers. The books are infinite, and their content changes based on the reader. The soul is read, and the book answers what you truly wish to know. But the books are not always true. Sometimes they tell us a fiction we want to hear. And yet even in there is some truth. It is a place of infinite knowledge, if you can sift through the fiction The character, Dwight, has the same power as those books. If he touches someone, a book about them manifests for him, telling him much about them. Because of this, he often learns things he didn't want to know, things that hurt him sometimes. It can be a burden, and past folks born with this power have gone mad, overwhelmed by information and truths that man's mind can't handle. Some seekers find truth. Some find comforting lies. Some find nothing. Some find nonsense. And some find madness.
@redsunflowers7322
It's so weird that YouTube recommended this video to me today, since I just read A Short Stay in Hell last night, which is based on the story The Library of Babel. Loved the video!
@NovoCognition
29:10 ; That last part reminds me of the Domain & Neuro-Physics used by the Forerunners & Precursors in Halo.
@iainballas
The opening of this sounds like the life of the average worker in the Administratum complex on Holy Terra. A massive maze of libraries, files and databanks the size of India. People are born, live, and die there with their only contact with the outside world being those datafiles. They are the best educated and most informed people in the galaxy, but have zero context for all of that info, so it may as well be gibberish they simply process according to the numbers on the top of each sheet. A planet at the core of an interstellar empire would be an amazing (maybe not GREAT) place to live, or at least tour.
@GadZookz
“Adam had’em” is perhaps the shortest poem in the English language. If the Library of Babel is a decent library then it should be in there but any library without Mr. Atos gets my vote. 🙂
@justingrey6008
Personally, I would rather have the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy.
@soberskater
My favorite episode since the existential crisis series... so glad to have sfia in my life...❤
@fgbpeiazijhn