The Library of Babel (Validation)
Tom Fearn · NIR news · 2015
The Library of Babel This is the title of a short story first published by Borges in 1941 and since republished in various collections of his stories in many languages. The references given below are just two of many possibilities. The story describes a library including all the possible books of a certain fixed length (1,312,000 characters). With 25 characters available this leads to a library of finite but impossibly large size: 10 to the power 1.8 million volumes, a number quite a lot higher than the current estimates of the number of atoms in the universe. Borges describes the frustration and despair of the inhabitants of the library, knowing that all knowledge is contained on its shelves, but not being able to identify which volumes contain it. In the modern era of “big data” Borges’s library exemplifies the distinction between data and information.