THE LIBRARY OF BABEL
"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite, number of hexagonal galleries..."
โ€” Jorge Luis Borges, 1941
Click anywhere to enter the Library
Click to look around. WASD to walk. Click any book to read it. Q/E near stairs to change floor.
Hexagon: 0 640 books per room ยท 410 pages per book ยท 29^3200 possible pages
Volume 1 of 32
Search the Library

Every text you can imagine already exists in this Library, at a computable address. Enter any text and we will find exactly where it resides.

(0/80 characters)
THE LIBRARY OF BABEL
"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries..."
โ€” Jorge Luis Borges, 1941

This library contains every possible book of 410 pages, where each page has 40 lines of 80 characters drawn from 29 symbols. Each hexagonal room holds 640 books across 4 walls of 5 shelves.

The total number of distinct pages is 293200 โ€” a number with over 4,600 digits. For comparison, the number of atoms in the observable universe is a mere 1080.

Somewhere in these infinite hexagons exists every poem ever written, every scientific discovery yet to be made, every love letter that could be composed, the precise account of your death, and the refutation of that account. The vast majority of books are gibberish โ€” an ocean of noise in which the occasional coherent phrase is a miracle that the Librarians call a Vindication.

The Library has existed ab aeterno.

THE SEARCH

Use the Search feature to prove the Library's completeness. Enter any text โ€” your name, a quote, a secret โ€” and the algorithm will compute the exact hexagonal room, wall, shelf, volume, and page where that text resides. Then navigate there and read it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Inspired by Jonathan Basile's libraryofbabel.info, the landmark digital Library of Babel. Basile's implementation uses a Linear Congruential Generator with modular inverses; this one uses an 8-round Feistel cipher operating at line level (2980 possible lines).

Both approaches solve the same core problem: a reversible bijective mapping that makes the Library complete and navigable โ€” given any text, we can compute its unique address without searching.