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Sunday, May 24, 2015 - 20:36 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Forward To The Past

Me: Curry instant noodles with actual curry chicken and potatoes. That's the life. *clicks link* ...huh, bin Laden was reading Confessions of an Economic Hit Man too? Banks caught rigging the forex market for years... and probably wind up ahead even after paying the fines. Yeah, that'll teach them! ...Hmm, LionsXII win the Malaysia Cup. Nice lah.

And what's coming up here... a suggestion to introduce tipping to improve the service culture? Let's hope employers won't simply slash wages and expect the tips to make up for it, in the unlikely event this comes to pass. The service industry's already taken a hit, in any case, with the beer curfew followed by the banning of beer promoters from hawker centres. See lah! Riot for what? Now want to enjoy a quiet pint or two at night also risk getting arrested liao.

*continues flipping* ...Jolin Tsai's latest MV featuring a female-female wedding banned, ironically hot on the heels of Ireland - a majority Catholic country, mind - legalizing it by some 62% of the popular vote... and which is kinda pointless since anybody can watch it on YouTube anytime. Honestly, it's more wholesome to me than, say, China Wine, even if it hasn't inspired Jay Chou like "chug collide-chug" has... oh yeah, drinking's on the way to being abolished here, I forgot. Who makes these half-baked decisions, anyway?


Quick! Quick! It's almost 10:30 p.m.!


Mr. Ham: Seeing as your ministers are piling on the 河蟹 trend as popularized by the CCP... and the kicker is, even they probably didn't bother to ban this particular music video, even though they're not too open themselves. Then again, Russia stronk, China stronk, so Singapore following their proud authoritarian lead is only to be expected, да?

Me: 就是说吗 - 同志, 要表态也用不着这样啦...


The All That Exists

Mr. Ham: Oh, and enlighten me here, human. There's this website that claims to contain all the books ever written, or that will ever be written - how the heck does that work?

Me: Lemme see. Ah, it seems an instantiation of Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel, as explained in its about section. Conceptually, it's quite magnificent - imagine a grand Library with "an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries... The arrangement of the galleries is always the same: Twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon's six sides... each bookshelf holds thirty-two books identical in format; each book contains four hundred ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, approximately eighty black letters..." Small wonder that it has endured, then.

Mr. Ham: But, how? I mean, all the books?!

Me: Well, as the website creator himself admitted, he originally started out actually randomly generating and saving the text, which he expectedly soon found to be unsustainable. Essentially, the full set has to contain all possible combinations of 1.312 million characters, which assuming 29 possibilities for each character - the lower-case letters and basic punctuation - turns out to be exactly 291312000 books; basically, a kinda large number. As it is, the website only promises all unique pages of 3200 characters, which brings us down to 293200, or some 104677, as the site creator helpfully states.

As to why pages instead of books, the probable reason is that from the nature of the Library, any identifier, i.e. title, for a book must be of at least the same informational capacity as the content of the book itself, if it is to be unique. Pigeonhole principle, basics of randomness, remember?

Mr. Ham: Uh-huh uh-huh.

Me: Still, the site can get away with having page identifiers of length about 1950... but only by allowing a larger character set within the identifiers - by including the digit characters - than the content. And indeed, 293200 is roughly equal to ~391950. Of course, by expanding the character set further, say to the ASCII 128-set, the required identifier length can be further shortened, maybe to about 700 characters, ballpark?

Thing is, when expressed in binary form, they are all of approximately equivalent length. In other words, when requesting a page, the identifier used to locate the page fully determines the page content itself! Thus, if unique books were to be guaranteed, the identifiers required would be about 820KB long. Perhaps not that much nowadays, but not something you want to hammer a server with.

A couple of minor comments here: first is that, while a pseudo-random generator might seem an obvious choice, all that is really required is to guarantee a unique one-to-one correspondence from identifier to content, which can be adequately achieved by a few banks of swap/flip operations on individual bits, or a trivial hash. Which, in turn, suggests that all the required code, for both searching and browsing, can actually easily be done locally by script, without hitting the hosting server, after an initial library download. Which, I gather, is what Mr. Robo would tell you.


Chase! Chase! Hamster!

Mr. Ham: Yup, this gobbledygook sounds like him, alright.

Me: If he were here.

Mr. Ham: Why, yes, I thought that's assumed.

Me: *ahem*

Mr. Ham: Oh, the search. Yes. Alright. Still, human, I'm not sure why you're so concerned. He's a grown-up hamster, dang it! Like me! You don't worry about me, do you?

Me: Well, just last week, you did almost blow up half the neighbourhood...

Mr. Ham: Keyword there's almost. But fine, I've dumped the extra stuff. No, I didn't try to hock them off on the Saudis, scout's honour. By the way, you ever try blast fishing on humpback whales? ...Why are you looking at me like that, they're not an endangered species. *taps on handphone* Oei, Ah Lark Szai Kia! Leeport status on Gong Tai Sui Peh!

Me: Gong Tai Sui Peh?!

Mr. Ham: Eh, one of our... affectionate nicknames for Mr. Robo. Wait, isn't that Ah Lark's ringtone for me?

*heavily tattooed hamster peeks in*

Ah Lark: Hey boss! You call? And ah, it's Conrad now. Must move with the times, lah. Skill upgrade, name also upgrade, steady pom pee pee!

Mr. Ham: Conrad your head lah. Didn't I tell you to follow it, *jabs at video feed of Mr. Robo's car*, and inform me immediately once it stops?

Conrad: Uh boss, you tell me over the phone. So I thought you mean "follow your blob on agar.io", as usual. But good news, you are still number four on the leaderboard. Eh boss, is the human okay? Why he keep hitting his head on the table?

Me: Anyway, he's reached the destination, so it's too late. It's totally out of our hands. With any luck, Mr. Mallard will just realise that it's all a huge misunderstanding. Right? Right?



To express our support for the Government's latest bit of censorship, we contribute this straight-until-cannot-be-any-straighter music video, to counter insidious influences from the gender-alternative camps.




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Next: Mr. Robo's New Profession


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