Message-ID: <321D7E7D.2C67412E@di.epfl.ch>
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 1996 11:48:45 +0200
From: Olivier Carmona <olivier.carmona@di.epfl.ch>
Organization: LAMI (EPFL)
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CC: Olivier Carmona <carmona@di.epfl.ch>
Subject: Re: Pandora's Picture
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Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!bb3.andrew.cmu.edu!newsfeed.pitt.edu!gatech!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!uwm.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!jussieu.fr!univ-lyon1.fr!in2p3.fr!swidir.switch.ch!epflnews.epfl.ch!

The principle is not that new at all. It's the transposition of the
image of Jorges Luis Borges from books to pictures. In the book called
Labyrinths (1947), the short story "The library of Babel" describes a
library where all the books which have been written and will be written
are present because it contains all the possible combinations (from
http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.html) :

"There are five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls; each shelf
contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four 
hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of
some eighty letters which are black in color."

"This thinker observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they
might be, 
are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the
twenty-two
letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have
confirmed: 
In the vast Library there are no two identical books. From these two
incontrovertible
premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves
register all the 
possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number
which, 
though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely
detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the
faithful 
catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues,
the 
demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of
the 
fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the
commentary 
on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the
true story
of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the
interpolations
of every book in all books."

	Still in the domain of writing, there is this another image close to
yours : if you put an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters,
eventually one will bash out the script for Hamlet (One may also
hypothesize a small number of monkeys and a very long period of time).
This Parable of the Monkeys came from the astronomer Sir Eddington
(1929) :

     ... If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter
it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army
of monkeys werestrumming on typewriters they might write all the books
in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more
favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the
vessel. 

A. S. Eddington. The Nature of the Physical World: The Gifford Lectures,
1927. New York: Macmillan, 1929, page 72. 

	Anyway, good luck in your quest of the face of God :-).

John Nicholson wrote:
> 
> PANDORA's Picture
> 
> Since, each monitor screen is made up of a finite number of pixels each
> with a finite number of colours, then you could write a program to go
> through every combination. Therefore, if you could watch the screen for
> long enough, you would see every painted masterpiece, every location in
> the world, every person in the world . Furthermore you would see your
> self looking at the screen, your birth, your death, your dreams. The
> past, present and future of anywhere in the universe would flic past your
> eyes. If God could be seen ,then you would even see the face of God.
> 
> If you like this simple fact then check out my web page at
> http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/plaza/hd76/jhome.htm for a further look
> at what I nicknamed the PANDORA PRINCIPLE.
> 

-- 
       ___________________________________________________
       |               Olivier Carmona                   |
       | Assistant au Laboratoire de Micro-Informatique  |
       | Batiment: IN-F, Bureau: 132, Tel: (21) 693 3908 |
       |   WWW: http://diwww.epfl.ch/lami/team/carmona   |
       |       email: Olivier.Carmona@di.epfl.ch         |
       |_________________________________________________|
