The Library of Babel is inside UARTSIFARTSI
In Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 story, the Library of Babel holds every possible book: 410 pages, 40 lines per page, about 80 characters per line, drawn from 25 symbols (22 letters, the space, the comma and the period). That is roughly 251,312,000 books — nearly all of them gibberish, a few of them every story ever told.
UARTSIFARTSI holds every possible black-and-white picture. Because every page of text can be drawn as pixels, every book in the Library is also somewhere in the universal gallery. The Library is a subset; the gallery is the superset.
Why text fits inside pixels
- Give each of the 25 symbols a small bitmap glyph — the same way our language patterns already draw Latin, Chinese and Braille characters.
- Lay the glyphs out line by line. Each page becomes one black-and-white picture.
- Every possible page is therefore one specific image — and the gallery of all images contains it, along with every other page in the Library.
The reverse does not work. A string of letters cannot show a floor plan of the hexagonal galleries, a portrait of a librarian or a diagram without first inventing a code to describe them. Pictures contain writing; writing only describes pictures.
The books, drawn in pixels
Every picture below is a real UARTSIFARTSI image with its own number (click a symbol to see its number). We drew each of the 25 symbols as a tiny 3×5 glyph (our 22 letters leave out k, w, y and z).
The 25 symbols
A page excerpt
Four 40-symbol lines from one imaginary page. Three are gibberish; one makes sense. In the Library, sense is that rare — far rarer.
Type your own line
A whole page
A real page of 40 lines × 80 characters needs about 320×240 pixels — ten tiles across and eight down at our current 32×32 limit, each tile its own image number. The full page is in the universal gallery; our catalogue just shows it a tile at a time.
A note on scale
Our browsable catalogue currently stops at 32×32 pixels — enough for a few characters, not a whole book page. The idea of the universal gallery has no size limit: bigger grids hold whole pages, then whole books. The Library sits inside that idea, even though no website could list it all.
Side by side
| Property | UARTSIFARTSI | Library of Babel |
|---|---|---|
| Contains | Every black-and-white image | Every 410-page book |
| Building block | One pixel: light or dark | 25 written symbols |
| Shape | Two-dimensional grids | One long line of text |
| Order | Center-out spiral; every image has a next and previous | Hexagons, shelves and volumes with no meaningful sequence |
| Holds the other? | Yes — every page can be drawn | No — pictures need a code first |
| Visitors | Can name any image forever | Wander and search |
Try it: pick a language in worth naming to see letters appear as pictures, or browse in spiral order. For the Library’s own image annex, see UARTSIFARTSI vs Babelia.