“Theoretically, there is a formula or logarithm that will write all books ever written and ever to be written.”
That was the thought I woke up with in the middle of the night. I don’t know if it’s ever been calculated. I’ll look for it when I can find the time. But if you know of it, please contact me.
How it works:
- Assumption: We use the following characters
- The standard letters of the English alphabet: 26.
- The standard punctuation: 16
- Limit the number of letters per word to a 45 maximum.
This is actually not the longest word, but for calculation reasons, let’s ignore the chemical composition of titin since it would be 189,819 letters and takes 3 hours to pronounce. - The longest sentence ever written in literature is in Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club with a single sentence that is 13,955 words long.
- We will write a fictional novel: The longest novel in the world is A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust which is about 9,609,000 characters long, so including letters, spaces and punctuation.
- Write formula (let’s see if someone can do it for me)
- Use the biggest computer ever built to perform it and spit out every book ever written and to be written.