The Library Of Babel

此消息不是

Spoiler

("cǐ xiāo xí bùshì" uses accented letters when "romanized")

 

A Library of Babel with books of only hànzì (漢字, simplified: 汉字) would be much, much bigger. But since a hànzì is an entire word, there'd be no typical gibberish like in a Library of Babel that uses Latin letters. It'd usually be gibberish of random whole words instead. Also hànzì can be used to pronounce foreign words when strung together, so could also be used to sound out English. But like I said, because it'd be thousands of characters instead of a mere couple dozen, such a 巴別图书馆 ("Bābié túshū guǎn") would be much, much bigger.

 

Try and put this symbol on a keyboard:

 

*o-

 

Checkmate

 

From what I can see, it's N^S = C.

N = number of different characters
S = space or how many characters there's room for in a thing
C = number of possible combinations of the thing

So for example, if there's a paper with a 10x10 grid on it and one is working with 26 letters and a space per grid square, there's 27^100* different combinations that can be written down.

*(that's 1.368915e+143 BTW)

 

Hell yeah, Jorge Luis Borges is the shit. I have a collection of his short stories, they rock.

 

En la biblioteca de Babel hay muchos libros.

 

And yet it seems the vast majority of the books are full of gibberish.

Just like the vast majority of possible images and sounds are statics.