For those who haven&#x27;t read the short story <i>The Library of Babel</i> by Borges, it&#x27;s about a fictional universe consisting of an infinite library filled by books which contain every possible combination of letters from the English alphabet.<p>In the story, people wander the vast Library for all their lives, seeking books which hold anything recognizable. Statistically, the odds of finding a book with even one intelligible sentence is next to nothing. But in theory, if every story is written there, then somewhere is a book which predicts your whole life, and another which tells correctly the location of any book you might seek, and so on.<p>This website reproduces that fictional universe in digital form. But if you look at the About page, it explicitly says that they do <i>not</i> simply generate and store each page as it&#x27;s requested.<p>So how could this work? Click &quot;Browse&quot; to enter the library, or &quot;Search&quot; to find any text you can imagine somewhere in the library. The &quot;Search&quot; function confounds me more than any other aspect of this. Try a lengthy sentence describing you, even use your own name, and it&#x27;s there, of course.....but how can it find it so fast?<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;libraryofbabel.info&#x2F;
Ask HN: How do you think this site works?