[vokep]

This got me to some interesting thinking. If the library contains no information because you need the information you look for, what about the ability of it to at least match to information you look for? Or put another way, the library does begin to have information if you have the information you're looking for. The fact of finding the particular information is different than the library not containing it.

I can't seem to figure out how to type this out in a way that maks sense but basically I'm thinking when an AI like GPT-3 is working its sort of sorting through the library of babel and finding words. Or when speaking its as though the library of babel is at immediate call in the brain, which sorts through near instantly finding the book that satisfies the next word. The website that allows browsing the library helps show what I mean, you can look on it and click random and search for information in it. The thing itself contains "no information" but it also does as in this case you may find something (first page I saw had the word 'beef')

[Loughla]

The problem is that it does contain everything, and therefore contains nothing (worth knowing that you don't already know).

In other words, you could never find an answer that you could say, with 100% certainty is accurate, unless you already knew the answer. You can't ask an unending database a question that you don't already know the answer to, because every answer is there.

Ask it, what is the primary atomic structure of beef? You'll get answers for anything. They're made of carbon. They're made of rainstorms. They're not real. You're beef.

So by saying it doesn't contain information, what they're really meaning is that it doesn't contain useful information. You can't do anything with it that doesn't amount to a wild guess.

[jazzyjackson]

It does take a talented writer to talk about infinity!

I think maybe there are paths through the library that would prove useful for browsing, as is the case when I visit a normal library: I don't always know what I'm looking for ahead of time, I let the arrangement of books inspire me, see what books are next to the one's I already know.

I think it's kind of like a compression algorithm, you have the compressed data, and then you have the decoder. Any complexity the original data had is either in the data, or in the decoder. The library of babel is a pathological case: the compressed data is 0 bytes: whatever choices you make in finding the data is actually information outside of the system, as in: you might as well be making it up on the spot.

However, if the books in the library are ordered somehow, that is complexity being added back into the compressed data, and it no longer contains "no information"