Chapter 82 14.7 Traverse randomness

When it comes down to it, breeding something useful is almost as magical as creating one.This is borne out by Richard Dawkins' assertion that "when the search space is large enough, an efficient search process is indistinguishable from true creation." In a library of all possible books Here, discovering a particular book is tantamount to writing it. Humans realized this centuries ago—long before computers came along.As Denis Diderot wrote in 1755: William Poundstone, author of The Circular Universe, uses an analogy to illustrate why searching the vast Borgesian library of knowledge is as difficult as searching the Borgesian library of nature itself.Imagine a library of all possible videos.Like all Borgesian spaces, the vast majority of the library's collections are filled with noise and random shades of gray.Usually all a tape can play is two hours of snowflakes.The biggest problem with finding a tape to look at is that a random tape, other than itself, cannot be represented by symbols that take up less space or less time.Most of the collections in the Borges Library cannot be compressed even a little bit. (This incompressibility is the latest definition of randomness.) To search a tape, all you have to do is watch its contents, so the information, time, and energy spent organizing the tape will outweigh the effort required to create it. No matter what the content of this tape is.

Evolution is the dumb solution to this conundrum, and what we call intelligence happens to be a tunnel through the room.When I was searching in the Borges Library, if I was alert enough, maybe within a few hours I would have figured out the direction to go around the library's shelves and go straight to the Yellow Dragon.I may have noticed that generally there is more "feel" going to the left of the last book I turned to.I might run a few miles to the left, a distance that used to take many generations of slow evolution to pass.I might have learned about the library's architecture and could predict where the desired book was hidden so that I could outsmart random guessing and turtle-crawling evolution.By combining evolution with learning about the library's inner order, I might be able to find mine.

Some students of the human mind have made a powerful argument that thinking is the evolution of ideas inside the brain.According to this claim, all creation has evolved.As I write these words, I have to admit it.At the beginning of writing this book, I didn't have a formed sentence in my mind, and I chose a phrase "I was" completely at random; then I subconsciously made a quick assessment of the words in my head that might be used later.I picked a "closed" that felt good.Then, move on to picking the next word from the 100,000 possible words.Each one selected bred words for the next generation, until I evolved almost a complete sentence.In making sentences, the further back I go, the more my choices are limited by the words I chose earlier.So learning can help us reproduce faster.

But the first word of the next sentence could be any word.The end of the book, far away from 150,000 choices, seems so far away, like the end of the galaxy.Books are out of reach.Of all the books that have been written or will be written in the world, only in this one are the two consecutive sentences preceding this sentence found. Now that my book is halfway done, I'm going to continue to evolve the text.What's the next word I'm going to write in this chapter?To be honest, I don't know anything.What could they be?There are perhaps billions of possibilities - even given that they are constrained and must conform to the logic of the previous sentence.Did you guess the next sentence is this one?I didn't guess either.But when I reached the end of this sentence, I found that it was it.

I write by looking.I evolved it on my desk to find it in the Borges library.Word by word, I walk through the library of Jorge Luis Borges.I found my book by virtue of some wonderful combination of learning and evolution that our minds go through.It's on the bookshelf in the middle, almost at eyebrow height, and its coordinates are in the seventh corridor of District 52427.Who knows if it's really my book, or almost my book (perhaps this or that paragraph is slightly different, or some important fact is left out)? The greatest satisfaction of this long search—whether the book be a jewel or a treasure—is that only I can find it.