[2f0ja]

Cixin Liu has a great short story 'Cloud of Poems' in which an alien intelligence seeks to write every possible permutation of traditional Chinese poetry, to show up a human poet.

I didn't bother to check the math on this, but in the story there is not enough matter in the universe to in some way encode every possible traditional Chinese poem!

[TomaszZielinski]

Ha, Cixin Liu! At one point I've read everything by him available in Polish, but I don't remember this specific short story. I guess I need switch to English :)

By the way, reading a "double-translation" (Chinese -> English -> Polish) is fascinating--at times it's more than obvious that what you're reading is not what the author has written, but you have no idea at all what the original concept was. (Unlike "single" EN -> PL translations, where I can often figure out the idiom or concept that was used in the original.)

[ajuc]

> but in the story there is not enough matter in the universe to in some way encode every possible traditional Chinese poem!

In fact if you formally describe how you generate the permutations that's one of such encodings of these permutations (and the optimal one - see Kolmogorov Complexity :) ).

So there is definitely enough matter to do it. Similarly we can encode PI despite it having infinite number of digits.

[pbhjpbhj]

This seems like a reference-object error (a denotation error, or sense-reference error in philosophical terms), except the functional definition and the partial numerical expansion are both references to PI rather than being PI itself.

Ce-ci n'est-pas une remarque, and all that.

[ajuc]

We're talking encodings not platonic ideals.

Forget PI. Let's take 1337. Or is it MCCCXXXVII?

Is it 2 or 1.(9)? Or 10 (binary)? Different encodings, same number. Some encodings are just less optimal than others.

Same with text. Is the poem in utf-8 and utf-16 a different poem? What if you zip the file? These are just encodings, and there's no point ignoring the good ones (which for non-random strings are usually programs).

[pbhjpbhj]

Never thought of brute-forcing all possible English language haiku before now ... huh.

[TeMPOraL]

If you do, you'll realize that this solves nothing. Imagine having a set of all possible English language haiku. Almost all of them would be incomprehensible garbage. Finding a good haiku in that set would take just as much effort as coming up with it.