Why wreck a blank canvas? (opens in new tab)

I'm not well-versed in information theory, so this may be a misinterpretation. But this strikes me as a beautiful truth that rewards careful pondering.

A library containing all possible books may contain all the gems of knowledge in the world, but it also contains far more nonsense: Books full of random letters that mean nothing, as well as real books with changes made to them, both unnoticeable and noticeable. Such a library, though containing all information, would not contain any information about which books contain real information and which do not. A single real book, though, while it may contain factual errors, can at least be guaranteed to contain the beliefs and assumptions of its author, which is more than you can say about the infinite library.

Look at it this way: an infinite list of strings containing all possible strings (or even a finite list of strings containing all possible strings shorter than a given length) contains less information than a program or essay that I wrote, because the infinite list gives no indication about which strings are "important", "informational" or "useful", while my one essay or program contains concise, easily-extractable information intended for a particular purpose.

One more example, just for fun: Imagine I'm a stupid bank robber who keeps all the plans for my heists and the names of my partners in one Word document on my hard drive. If the police arrest me, they have enough information to send me and my partners to jail. However, imagine that I've written a program that makes a million copies of my secret plan and changes the names and locations inside all of the copies to random values. Now, if I get caught, without knowing which document is real and which are fake, the authorities don't have any useful information.

It requires only a very short program to print out all possible books, and a much longer program to print out one particular book.

To look at it another way, by the trivial isomorphism between any class and its complement, the library containing all possible books has just as much information as the library containing no books.

Think about how you would specify a book in the "all possible books" library - you would need a number at least as large as the book itself, in the general case! This might be easier to see if you imagine the "library" as the set of all possible numbers (in binary) up to a certain reasonable maximum. So you specify the book...by giving the binary representation of the book, which is simply its index if you order them by their numerical value. So you can see how having all books in your library is the same as having no books.

I think he's relating to the "book of five rings" / "art of war" way of writing books.

Theres many big long books that are merely churned out, or are written before an author has reached a point of completeness about the subject he's writing on. Worse, they could be written as "wines of fear" where they are written not to directly offend anyone.

On the other hand, there are a few beautiful books that are short, yet establish mental frameworks that cover all the other books. The book of five rings is touted as one.

Personal example: There's volumes of business books that all harken back to people being some mixture of evangelist, maven, or relater. Books like "the human fabric" or religious books like the "bhagavad gita" establish the same framework.

I thought about mine a lot though. It was awesome in my imagination.

then your application and idea is as good as the limits of pg's imagination :)

I think you should add an old-fashioned victrola underneath the paintings, constantly playing 4'33".