The Library of Babel and Infinite Monkeys
Infinite Monkeys and the Library of Babel
There exists within the fields of mathematics and philosophy what is called the “infinite monkey theorem,” stating that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter given an infinite amount of time will eventually write the completed works of William Shakespeare. While the example text varies from saying to saying – sometimes replaced with Hamlet or the King James Bible – the essence remains the same. Because there are a finite number of characters on a keyboard and thus finite combinations of those keys, it can be said with certainty that an infinite span of time will result in every single one of those permutations of characters being typed. The theorem has applications everywhere from probability to evolution to multiverse theories. But beyond these highly technical concepts, the infinite monkey theorem has found a place in literature and art for its implications about randomness and meaning in the universe. The advent of the Internet and advances in supercomputing have allowed artists and scientists alike to better portray the abstract concepts of infinity and randomness, though they are not the first to attempt to do so.
At its core, Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Library of Babel is another expression of the infinite monkey theorem, presenting a seemingly infinite library composed of hexagonal galleries. Each contains four walls of five shelves each, which in turn hold “thirty-five books of uniform format” – four hundred and ten pages per book, forty lines per page, eighty letters per line. Though the organization of the library is perfectly ordered and repetitive, the contents of the books are not so. In fact, the twenty-five different symbols comprising the tomes are arranged completely at random, or so it seems. “For every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences,” the narrator explains. And because no two books are identical, the librarians come to this conclusion:
“The Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols.” Everything that ever was, is, will be, or can be, is contained in the shelves of the Library, from “the minutely detailed history of the future” to a guide to all of the books in the entire Library, or anything else that can be conjured by human imagination and beyond.
The librarians search endlessly for any book holding legible meaning, realizing there exists “no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon.” While they at first rejoice in this realization, they soon become despondent with the hopelessness of finding anything they deem as meaningful within the endless shelves. They believe that “nonsense is normal” and “the reasonable (and even humble and pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception.” The narrator, however, disagrees, arguing that everything in the Library contains meaning, that every word or phrase or sentence, from “The Combed Thunderclap” to “Axaxaxas mlö” to “o iscfkln vwuhecmnv” can “no doubt be justified in a cryptographical or allegorical manner.” It is impossible to create a combination of letters “which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning.” This acts as a metaphor for the art of reading. Every text, be it a science textbook or a car manual or The Library of Babel can be interpreted by a reader as having meaning, or in fact multiple or infinite meanings.
Borges’ story has gained new significance due to the growing prominence of the Internet. Whereas before, the reader was restricted to the books in their local library branch or their private collection, they now have access to an exponentially expanding and seemingly endless volume of texts. With the Internet, nearly everyone can read almost anything that has ever been published. And no longer are we exposed to only works published as journals or books, but rather we can read the thoughts of anyone with an Internet connection via social media or blogs. As with Library of Babel, the sheer quantity of works can be overwhelming, and the burden to discern and find meaning falls more and more on the reader himself. Indeed, the ways in which we humans read have adapted to this digital age, as discussed in How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine” by Katherine Hayles. The amount of print that can be accessed simultaneously and immediately – the majority of which is irrelevant to any given person – has led to new approaches, including “search queries, filtering by keywords, skimming, hyperlinking, ‘pecking’, and fragmenting” along with “scanning” and “juxtaposing.” Undoubtedly, Borges’ hypothetical librarians utilize such techniques in order to scour the shelves of the Library; like human search engines looking for any and all rational keywords, they would have to hyper-read so as not to get bogged down in the “nonsense” that constitutes the bulk of the books.
In addition to similarly massive volumes of seemingly extraneous information contained by both the Internet and the Library of Babel, technological advances also help to depict some abstract ideas expressed in Borges’ story – randomness and the infinite. Both are notoriously difficult for the human mind to comprehend and impossible to us to produce. And both are integral to the infinite monkey theorem and the premise of The Library of Babel. Of course, everything we create is finite, for we are restrained by resources, by space, and by time. Infinity can only be displayed by the expanses of the universe (we think) and by the abstractions of our imagination, through mathematics and metaphors like Borges’ Library.
Randomness, however, is more complicated. Doing something randomly seems like it should be easier than being methodical; writing this paper requires thought and planning, while writing a random string of words does not. But when tasked with randomness, humans simply cannot be function. A human-generated “random” string of words will invariably reveal loose associations between each word. Even computers cannot be completely random, for their “pseudo-random” number generators originate from human-designed algorithms, which are in themselves a form of pattern. Programmer Jonathan Basile created a virtual “Library of Babel” which auto-generates pages of “random” content, just like in Borges’ universe. Users can visit random pages and encounter countless lines of gibberish, but it is impossible to resist the temptation to comb through the characters for anything that makes sense. Similarly, there exist several websites that serve as “random text generators” for use as fillers in templates, a la “Lorem Ipsum.” But the human mind cannot help but make connections between these arbitrary words, creating coherence and order.
In 2003, students at the University of Plymouth attempted to recreate loosely the “infinite monkey theorem” by placing a typewriter in the enclosure of six macaques at the Paignton Zoo. As there were neither infinite monkeys nor an infinite amount of time, the primates only managed to type out five pages in a month. And rather than being random, the text consisted mainly of the letter “s” and not a single word, for monkeys are not the truly random automatons proposed by the infinite monkey theorem. Neither are humans. Our brains have evolved to see pattern and meaning everywhere, from the spirals of nautilus shells to the arrangement of stars into constellations. Every field of study is dedicated to uncovering this meaning – if there is an inherent order to the universe – or creating meaning – if the universe is indeed random. When we read, we do just this – looking for symbols and patterns in the text, attaching significance to them, and interpreting our own meaning from them, regardless of the author’s original intention.
Works Cited
Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. New York: Grove Press, 1963.
Hayles, N. Katherine. "How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine." ADE Bulletin ADE, 2010, 62-79. doi:10.1632/ade.150.62.