How is the Library of Babel website isn’t lagging like crazy?
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A typical website has a bunch of data that lives inside of it. When you do a search on that website, the website has to flip through everything it has looking for matches, and then serve anything it finds back to you. This can be a very intensive process.
The Library of Babel does not do this. It does not have any data. What it has instead is a clever little black box. The box can take in any string of characters (from the set it lets you use, up to a certain max length) and from those characters it will spit out an address. Or, it can take in an address and spit back out the string of characters.
Due to the way the box is built, this is always a 1-to-1 mapping. That is, each possible string of characters always generates the same address every time, and each possible address always generates the same string of characters every time. There are also no leftovers; every possible string has an address and every possible address has a string.
What this allows the website to do, then, is take your “search”, feed it into the black box, and spit out an address (the room/wall/shelf/book/page number). The website then uses some smoke and mirrors to make it *look* like it “takes you to” that place. You don’t truly “”go”” anywhere in this process, the website merely spits out exactly what you gave it, plus some surrounding content auto-generated through the same black box on the fly.
Browsing the site instead of searching is just the same process in reverse. By navigating around the rooms and shelves, you’re essentially just searching using addresses. The site can feed those addresses into the black box to get strings of text to show you.
Since no actual searching is really being done here, just on-the-fly generation of content, the Library of Babel is very fast.
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