Brilliant Idea

You've all heard how big bang theorists think that if you had a bunch of monkeys pounding on typewriters for millenia, eventually one of them would accidentally write Hamlet in it's entirety, right?

Well I've had an idea in that vien. What if there was a computer so powerful that it could in a reasonable amount of time combine all characters into every possible combination of 500 pages length or less, actually writing every single 500 page book that is even possible in the english language.

Then of course you filter them for spelling and gramatical errors and nonsense phrases so all you've got left is stuff that makes sense. Then you get thousands of volunteers to start reading and rating all of the books in tournament style, until we actually have the single best book that is humanly possible in our language.

Sorry, I know. These are the thoughts that kept me out of the really good schools. Still its an amusing piece of absurdity if you ask me.

Originally posted by The Vagabond
What if there was a computer so powerful that it could in a reasonable amount of time combine all characters into every possible combination of 500 pages length or less, actually writing every single 500 page book that is even possible in the english language.

The South American writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story dealing with this topic - The Library of Babel.

The idea was that using the 26 letters, a space, a comma, and a period, there is a massive, yet finite number of possible combinations. IOW, there is a limit to the number of books which can be written!

The Library of Babel

Good thought, V.



[edit on 4-9-2005 by quango]