I don't understand why so many people seem so fascinated by constructions like the library of Babel. Yes it contains the answers to all your questions, but there are some significant drawbacks. * It has more wrong information than right information, with no way to tell the difference. * If you had an oracle that could tell you how to get to the book you need, the navigation instructions to get to the book will be at…
I wonder if there is some way to create a latent-space Library of Babel in which you only find incoherent gibberish with extremely long keys, with the shortest ones pointing specifically to the most common/likely strings of text, in manageable computational complexity.
I don't understand why so many people seem so fascinated by constructions like the library of Babel. Yes it contains the answers to all your questions, but there are some significant drawbacks. * It has more wrong information than right information, with no way to tell the difference. * If you had an oracle that could tell you how to get to the book you need, the navigation instructions to get to the book will be at…
I wonder if there is some way to create a latent-space Library of Babel in which you only find incoherent gibberish with extremely long keys, with the shortest ones pointing specifically to the most common/likely strings of text, in manageable computational complexity.
Reproducing the text of a book in the library is a synonym for identifying the book. So this is really called "text compression", which is a well-studied field.
For a more practical version (containing only infohashes that are observed on the dht) there is bitmagnet [1]. No public instances though, you have to self-host
I don't understand why so many people seem so fascinated by constructions like the library of Babel. Yes it contains the answers to all your questions, but there are some significant drawbacks. * It has more wrong information than right information, with no way to tell the difference. * If you had an oracle that could tell you how to get to the book you need, the navigation instructions to get to the book will be at…
To your first bullet, I believe this is one of the central points of the original Borges story :)
I don't understand why so many people seem so fascinated by constructions like the library of Babel. Yes it contains the answers to all your questions, but there are some significant drawbacks. * It has more wrong information than right information, with no way to tell the difference. * If you had an oracle that could tell you how to get to the book you need, the navigation instructions to get to the book will be at…
Another way of looking at it is that the library of Babel would be less useful than an equivalent quantity of blank paper. For example, you could use it to print books in English instead of gibberish. Multiple copies of those books, even.
For a more practical version (containing only infohashes that are observed on the dht) there is bitmagnet [1]. No public instances though, you have to self-host 1: https://github.com/bitmagnet-io/bitmagnet
I don't understand why so many people seem so fascinated by constructions like the library of Babel. Yes it contains the answers to all your questions, but there are some significant drawbacks. * It has more wrong information than right information, with no way to tell the difference. * If you had an oracle that could tell you how to get to the book you need, the navigation instructions to get to the book will be at…
I wonder if there is some way to create a latent-space Library of Babel in which you only find incoherent gibberish with extremely long keys, with the shortest ones pointing specifically to the most common/likely strings of text, in manageable computational complexity.
In a library of all possible strings, this is just text compression (as the other comment observes). But in a finite library it gets even simpler, in a cool way! We can treat each text as a unique symbol and use an entropy encoding (eg Huffman) to assign length-optimized key to each based on likelihood (eg from an LLM). Building the library is something like O(n log n), which isn't terrible. But adding new texts would change the IDs for existing texts (which is annoying). There might be a good way to reserve space for future entries probabilistically? Out of my depth at this point!
Is this legal? I’m of the impression that publishing infohashes to copyrighted content is illegal under DMCA?
The site doesn't publish any, except the two legal torrents that are on the front page. Any others you have to either request specifically, or are simply randomly generated.