The Actual Library of Babel

So some madman probably read this story and thought, “but what if it actually existed?” Obviously no one could build such an immense place, but with the power of computers and the internet, you can actually browse through the Library of Babel. The link to the website is https://libraryofbabel.info/

The website is laid out in much the same way as Borges describes the library, with hexes, 4 walls in a hex, 5 shelves on a wall, and twenty 410 page books on each shelf. You can tool around by entering a random seed to find a hex (which is defined by a string of 3260 letters and numbers, thus giving the website currently 36^3260 hexes) and pick out a book from there, which will almost assuredly by gibberish, or you can search for any text you want and it will spit out the book in which that text is contained. Currently, the website is not quite at what Borges proposed, as it only contains all possible pages, not all possible books (To do this, the dev would need to add all possible combinations of these pages, which would be a stupidly large number). It’s not a very helpful website, and I can’t see my life being consumed by it like the librarians in Borges’ story, but it is fun nonetheless.

It’s really interesting to me that something Borges wrote in 1941, which he probably assumed would be complete fiction, and could only exist theoretically, has come somewhat into real life through this website. I wonder what he would think if he could see it.