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October 23, 2005
Borges' infinite library
I had some initial problems with the premise of this piece, in that the term "infinite" was used somehwat loosely. That said, I appreciated the part where he points out that in reality there is a finite number of books in the library because they are each unique combinations of a finite alphabet (or alphabets).
In a way it reminded me of a conversation I had last year about the old saying about monkeys and shakespeare. The adage is that if you set up an infinite number monkeys with typewriters, one of them will eventually write the complete works of shakespeare. The conclusions I reached regarding this adage were as follows:
1) If you had an infinite number of monkeys, then you would have the complete works of shakespeare instantly (rather than eventually)
2) The effort to produce the desired results, assuming a a fixed number of monkeys, fixed charachter set and total randomness can be measured in units of monkey-hours (number of monkeys * number of hours)
3) There is a finite number of monkey-hours that would be required, and this number is basically a function how fast monkeys type
4) Mathematically, assuming a given piece is 8000 characters long, and we are dealing with 30 possible characters, this number would be very large (# of monkeys)(30^8000)/(monkey typing speed in characters per hour)
5) To accomplish this feat in one person's lifetime, you would need a quantity of monkeys that greatly exceeds the number of monkeys that have ever lived
6) Even if you did have that many monkeys, there is probably not enough room on the face of the earth to support all of them
7) If you found a way to somehow stack them, the sphere of monkeys around the earth would be so large that many of them would need to be furnished with air supplies as they would extend into space.
8) At this point, obviously, one has to be concerned with how to handle issues of nourishment, waste removal, and breeding successive generations of new typing monkeys. Plus you have to watch out that the monkeys on the outer layers are not somehow burnt by the sun.
But i digress.
I liked the way Borges described the way the people who inhabited his Library tried to cope with such an overwhelmingly large undertaking such as making sense of the world in which they found themselves. This serves as a fairly transparent metaphor to how we try to understand our universe. He even throws in a religion allegory, which was a nice touch.
In an attempt to tie my earlier monkey tangent to the reading a bit closer, I'd say an interesting common theme is man's effort to make sense out of a dauntingly complex undertaking. I think this is a key element of what being inside a labyrinth is all about.
Posted by Andrew Maskin at October 23, 2005 05:36 PM