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[Gunner-Chan]

It's not a generator given all the specific pages and volumes are preset. It's set up to try and mirror the library from the story it's a reference to, which was pretty much this only actually even larger. The site has every possible page spread out across the volumes you can read on the site, but it doesn't yet have every combination of pages that can exist.

[Dunamisdeos]

It does have an impressive sheer volume of content.

It's basically the travestificator writ large, though.

[NJW2000]

I don't think it's a random text generator exactly. It's more of either a procedural text generator strictly determined by a given seed, or a list of permutations of strings of letters, dependent on whether you're thinking about how they've coded it or how they frame it.

They may have added functionality as a random text generator though, I don't know.

Ninja'd by gunner-chan.


It's a neat implementation of a fun idea, but on reflection it's not hugely surprising that the sequence of letters making up the last thing you read is among the possible sequences of letters of that length.

[Dunamisdeos]

Well it is still neat.

[MrRoboto75]

I don't think it's a random text generator exactly. It's more of either a procedural text generator strictly determined by a given seed, or a list of permutations of strings of letters, dependent on whether you're thinking about how they've coded it or how they frame it.

They may have added functionality as a random text generator though, I don't know.

Ninja'd by gunner-chan.


It's a neat implementation of a fun idea, but on reflection it's not hugely surprising that the sequence of letters making up the last thing you read is among the possible sequences of letters of that length.

ur a procedual text generator

[NJW2000]

Sorry. I've been doing a bit too much uni maths lately. It gets to you. Some days I'd probably fail a Turing test.

Still, nothing wrong with pedantry. After all, you're right 

[wierd]

I had a similar idea at one point, but the implementation would be very different.

It would be a linux kernel module that produces a char device, capable of returning a string of a desired length, starting from a desired offset of a desired index.  The resulting string is the output slice of the linear progression through every possible combination of bits.

It would follow a basic progression:

Every combination of 1 byte
every combination of 2 bytes
every combination of 3 bytes
...

all the way to infinity.

Indexing occurs at every major repetition cycle. (every N byte cycle).


Why?  Because it should then be possible to encode every possible file as an index, an offset, and a length, in the output of this char device.  Think about the implications for file sharing! Instead of sharing that several gigabyte pirate movie file, you share an "index, offset, and length" file instead.  Your own computer then spontaneously coughs up the data for you.

I had considered calling it "Magic Hat".

I decided though, that the "index, offset, length" file itself would become very large over significant iterations, and never implemented the idea.

[Egan_BW]

Isn't that just file compression?

[bloop_bleep]

Um, wouldn't the size of the offset number be much greater than the size of the file itself?

[Trekkin]

It's like proposing to store everything by the index of the bit of pi where the sequence starts. Sure, you can store "everything", but good luck finding the index you want.

[Reelya]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupper%27s_self-referential_formula

It's a formula where when you plot it, it contains a bitmap of the formula itself. Part of the graph is actually this:



... which is itself the formula used to generate the above image.

Which sounds like voodoo, until you have it explained: the formula generates all possible bitmaps of a certain size, going up the y-axis. So, you can find anything that can be pixellated by finding the right index not just Tupper's self-referential formula.

[Mephisto]

It's like proposing to store everything by the index of the bit of pi where the sequence starts. Sure, you can store "everything", but good luck finding the index you want.

You're a bit late to that particular party.

Presenting, the only filesystem that, by mathematical definition, violates every single intellectual property that was or will be. But, like you said, you have to find it first.

[Reelya]

I'm guessing that the problem with that is that the index needed to indicate where some bit of information is ends up having just as many bits in it as the usable data.

So, if you want to use pi-fs to find the complete works of Shakespeare, you need to specific just as many bits (on average) as the actual length of the complete works of Shakespeare, just to get you past all the almost-complete-works-of-Shakespeare's that are in the "database".

To put it in simpler terms: say that you want to tell someone the index in pi at which a specific two-digit pattern appears. Since any two-digit value can be repeated (thus wasting "space"), then you need an index in excess of 2 digits to ensure that you can encode the value. It's a terrible storage system, since of you use 100 possible indexes, it can only ever return less than or equal to 100 distinct values.

[wierd]

If searching over an infinite space, yeah. Finding an instance of your file in there becomes hard.

I had considered using a number entropy value to aid in setting bounds though.  Searching a space of lower entropy than that of your desired data is nonsense. 

As for the offset problem... Use a percentage with a double float, and a corrective integer to store it.  Won't be a problem until your files are many TB in size.

There are benefits to the linear progression method over finding your sequence in an irrational number. The linear sequence has easily computed repetition, which would aid file location.

[JoshuaFH]

I got woken up by some mild discomfort... only to find that my entire right arm was completely paralyzed. Apparently I had been sleeping in just the wrong way that the blood flow to my arm was totally cut off, and its function was just gone. I'd cut off circulation to my limbs before, but this was the most severe case by far. I had to swing my body around and massage it with my left arm in order to will it back to life; it was a weird sensation only being able to move the tips of my fingers by the tiniest amount when I was concentrating on it so hard. I wasn't hurt at all, it just freaked me out.