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this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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Ask Lemmy
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Is this like the digital equivalent of a million monkeys with a million typewriters?
Basically, except it's indexed and searchable. Somewhere in those books, exists the phrase, "dharma curious updooted glitchington on lemmy" probably many times. But also "dharma curious hated glitchingtons post on lemmy" will also be there somewhere.
Wait, it's already there? I thought they were generating them currently?
Also, it's searchable? I didn't notice that. Just hit random. Going to go check it again!
Yeah sorta. It's apparently an algorithm that can produce every possible page of text, given a number. So it contains a staggering amount of gibberish, plus every page of every book that's ever been written, and many wildly incorrect, many vaguely correct and one exactly accurate description of the circumstances of your death.
I thought humanity was the "million monkeys with a million typewriters"
And also "every finite number is contained within PI" but with words.
That statement may be false, a simple explanation is that if you make a number out of π by removing all 9s it will keep the properties of π being infinite and non-repeating but never contain 9.
PI is not proven to be normal number. It means that those infinite digits repeating may not have uniform distribution, so somewhere far away in PI you can start just getting 1s,2s and 3s for example.
The point is that just because π is infinite it isn't guaranteed to have any combination of numbers in it
This is equivalent to the assertion that pi is a normal number, which is not proven.
Okay, cool! I had some fun looking for words in the pages. But if I understand it correctly, what we'll end up with individual words surrounded with gibberish on the pages. You're never going to get a page full of real words, right?
Every possible page is generated somewhere. I think there's a checkbox on the search page that fills the rest of the query with spaces.