Probability or creativity?
The Library of Babel, written by Jourge Luis Borges, explains elegantly the computational concept of creativity and the “law of truly large numbers”[1]. In essence, the novel introduces the mindboggling idea that every book or text with coherent and un-coherent connotation is already written — in theory. “The Library of Babel” manifests this through the endless hexagon rooms with books containing every single permutation of 29 characters (the letters, period, comma, and space). While the library contains the cure to cancer, all the harry potter books and the truth about god, it also contains books that only repeat a single letter and random arrangements ( and patterns) Meaning everything that can be described and expressed with language is within the infinite pages. However, it also means that endless pages cannot be comprehended by just using our basic language. Everything already exists — in theory.
This idea is not only true in the book, but also in what you and I call “our reality”. With the help of an algorithm, the same effect can be achieved by systematically combining the 25 characters.
Jonathan Basile did just that. He created a website where users can experience “The Library of Babel”. Due to the limits of today’s technology, the website contains all pages of 3200 symbols which is about 104677books. Meaning, this essay would be 100% plagiarism apart from the special characters.
So, if everything exists can we be creative and original? Let’s redefine creativity in the context of Babel’s library.
In the reality of the library, creativity has become to effectively journey across the hexagon rooms, looking for meaning within the arrangement of symbols? The library might even be creativity itself using the “three types of creativity“ (Boden 1992).[2] 1) The combinational aspect of creativity; new combinations of familiar ideas, is the books. 2) The exploratory aspect of creativity; the generation of new ideas by exploration of a space of concepts, is the hexagon rooms with humans travelling along the bookshelves and reading the not yet discovered texts. 3) The transformational aspect; involves a transformation of search space so new kinds of ideas can be generated. The transformation is the human’s mind’s ability to understand the text. no words have meaning before the human mind assigns them. This is also on the premise that in the infinite library/universe there is infinite language.
Therefore, we can be creative as long as we learn how to navigate.
References:
· Wikimedia Foundation. (2021, June 2). The Library of Babel. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel.
· Arthur I. Miller, “3 Margaret Boden’s Three Types of Creativity,” in The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity , MIT Press, 2019, pp.25–28.
· Law of Truly Large Numbers. (n.d.). https://archive.lib.msu.edu/crcmath/math/math/l/l126.htm.
· Helsinki University https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/webfm_send/1682 ( https://www.helsinki.fi/fi/tutustu-meihin)
[1] With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen (Diaconis and Mosteller 1989). Littlewood (1953) considered an event which occurs one in a million times to be ``surprising.’’ Taking this definition, close to 100,000 surprising events are ``expected’’ each year in the United States alone and, in the world at large, ``we can be absolutely sure that we will see incredibly remarkable events’’ (Diaconis and Mosteller 1989) https://archive.lib.msu.edu/crcmath/math/math/l/l126.htm
