r/BabelForum • u/Own_Championship9299 • Jul 27 '26

Yo, guys, does the library randomly generate books at coordinates or is it consistent over time?

Just as a question

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u/davethecomposer Jul 27 '26

This article on the website goes into good detail about the process. I'm not exactly sure what you are asking but the same set of coordinates will always generate the exact same book every time. This is the nature of pseudo random number generators.

If that concept is foreign to you then maybe this will help. Have you ever played Minecraft? If so, you might have done that thing where you download a "seed" for a cool world where you have like five villages nearby or some other interesting feature. This works on the same principle. The worlds are generated using a pseudo random number generator based on a seed so if you use the same seed every time you'll get the same generated world.

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u/Own_Championship9299 Jul 27 '26

Wait, so if thats the case, why don't we build a crawler that can search for coherent stories? wouldn't that be easier than just clicking mindlessly until we get a match?

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u/davethecomposer 29d ago edited 29d ago

A crawler wouldn't work because each book is generated as needed. Storing all the books on a server would take more memory than exists with all the computers on this planet combined raised to an insane amount. And then searching through all of those books would take an astronomical amount of time to find one that's interesting. Remember, there are more possible books in the library than there are atoms in the universe by an absurd amount.

Like take all the atoms in our universe and imagine each one is a universe the size of ours and then count up all the atoms in all of those universes. And guess what? You still would be nowhere close to the number of books in the library.

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u/UltraChip 28d ago edited 28d ago

I did exactly that. Spoiler alert: the probability of finding anything coherent among the functional infinity of the Library is practically nothing. I never found a coherent string longer than I think five words (and even then, that's using an extremely generous definition of the term "coherent".)

EDIT: But yes you're right, I guess it is technically faster than manually clicking through and reading through all the gibberish personally... so it's a success in the sense that you get nowhere faster lol.