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Thinking more about searching the Library of Babel. It transforms the problem, while leaving it the same.Permalink Look on archive.org
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Previously, you had to go on a weary trudge through the shelves, hunting out a gleam of intelligibility within the volumes.Permalink Look on archive.org
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Now intelligible words are easily found. But all you find is what you look for - English text stops meaning and just becomes more entropy.Permalink Look on archive.org
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Now there enters a mapping between shelfmark& page number and text. Each holds as much information as the other.Permalink Look on archive.org
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Who is to say which one has more meaning? Maybe the text is merely a way of compressing the address, representing it more compactly.Look on archive.org
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It makes explicit that the true form of the library is a mapping.Permalink Look on archive.org
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The search function allows you to see the map. But a map as big as the territory is not a useful map.Permalink Look on archive.org
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(The process of making a useful map is the process of making sense of the landscape, semantically chunking it. The Library has no semantics)Permalink Look on archive.org