Value As A Mathematical Thought Experiment
The Library contains at least books. (The average large library on Earth at the present time typically contains only several million volumes, i.e. on the order of about books. The world's largest library, the Library of Congress, has books.)
Just one "authentic" volume, together with all those variants containing only a handful of misprints, would occupy so much space that they would fill the known universe. Ignoring punctuation:
- Authentic volume:
- Variants with one misprint: = 31,488,000
- Variants with exactly two misprints: = 495,746,694,144,000
- Variants with exactly three misprints: = 5,203,349,369,788,317,696,000
- Variants with exactly four misprints: = 40,960,672,578,684,980,713,193,472,000
The number of different ways in which the books could be arranged is .
Read more about this topic: The Library Of Babel
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