In front of you stands a library; impossibly large and infinitely tall. In it, you'll find everything that has ever been written, every sentence spoken out loud and every repressed thought. But this monumental collection is not limited to what has been; it also contains everything that has yet to be written and everything that never will be. In short, it contains all possible combinations of spaces and letters.

All you need is a Christmas card. How do you find it? Probably asking the librarian is a wise choice.

SOL75 works in an analogous situation. It inhabits a higher-dimensional space where every point corresponds to a different version of an object. Among them, you might find a teapot made of butter, gloves with 7 fingers, stairs with a negative number of steps and, occasionally, even something useful.

But like in the library example, how can SOL75 find exactly what we want among the infinite possible variations of an object?

To begin with, our requests are very specific. Whenever SOL75 encounters an object, it can unequivocally decide if it is a solution matching our requirements or if it should be discarded. If we point it toward some arbitrary object, SOL75 will be able to recognize if it is a solution or not.

So, given enough time, we might find what we were looking for just by wandering through the space. However, since this space is infinite, this strategy is quite optimistic. Mapping the whole space beforehand is similarly impractical, it is one of those tasks which would take hundreds of years to complete. So how can we find anything in this impossibly huge space?

We ask the librarian, which, in this case, is an AI.

How the AI knows where stuff is, or better yet, how we trained it, are valid questions, which we will explore in the next update. The core point is that SOL75 does not create a design like a craftsman would, rather it finds it among the multitude of all possible shapes.

Notes

The aforementioned library really does exist (although no paperback edition has been printed yet). You can find it at https://libraryofbabel.info/

It has been a while since the last update, but SOL75 development is still very much active.