What Is Random? by Edward Beltrami

Author:Edward Beltrami
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer-Verlag Wien 2012
Published: 2015-04-27T16:00:00+00:00

In the next chapter Janus returns to establish a similar reconciliation between the dual views of randomness as information and complexity.

[4]

Algorithms, Information, and Chance

Edward Beltrami

The Library is composed of an … infinite number of hexagonal galleries … (it) includes all verbal structure, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense. It is useless to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons under my administration is entitled The Combed Thunderclap and another The Plaster Cramp and another Axaxacas mlö. These phrases, at first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a justification is verbal and, ex hypothesi, already figures in the Library. I cannot combine some characters dhcmrlchtdj which the divine library has not forseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning.

The certitude that some shelf in some hexagon held precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible seemed almost intolerable. A blasphemous sect suggested that … all men should juggle letters and symbols until they constructed, by an improbable gift of chance, these canonical books … but the library is … useless, incorruptible, secret.

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of babel”

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