Sources & Acknowledgements

The Infinite is built on things that already existed.

Its passages are not generated by artificial intelligence and its randomness is not invented by the app. The experience brings together a large public literary collection, a physical source of quantum randomness, and software built to connect the two.

Project Gutenberg

The Infinite’s literary collection is drawn from works made available through Project Gutenberg, one of the world’s oldest digital libraries of freely accessible books.

Project Gutenberg preserves and distributes electronic editions of works whose legal status allows them to be made available through its collection. The Infinite processes source texts from that collection to create the eligible books and passages used by the app.

The source material spans literature, philosophy, religion, history, science, poetry, drama and many other forms of human writing.

Source information for an individual reveal is available from within The Infinite.

Learn more at Project Gutenberg.

The Australian National University

The Infinite’s online quantum randomness originates in quantum random-number infrastructure associated with The Australian National University.

The app does not connect directly to ANU each time a reveal occurs. Quantum-origin values are obtained and handled through The Infinite’s protected backend system before being used for bounded random selections.

The quantum source provides randomness. It does not interpret a user’s question, select a meaningful passage, or determine what a revealed passage means.

The technical role of quantum randomness in The Infinite is explained in more detail on the Why Quantum Randomness? page.

The passage collection

The raw source library is not used unchanged.

Building The Infinite requires processing source texts so that the app can identify readable passages while preserving their relationship to the original works. Editorial and technical rules are used to remove or avoid material such as formatting artefacts, obvious metadata and unsuitable passage boundaries.

The selection process itself remains separate from those rules. The filtering system determines which books and passages are eligible. Randomness then selects from that eligible collection.

How selection is weighted

The Infinite uses a book-first selection model.

First, every eligible book has an equal chance of being selected. Then, within the selected book, every eligible passage has an equal chance of being selected.

This means a short eligible book and a very long eligible book have the same first-stage chance of being chosen.

JCapps Digital

The Infinite is designed, developed and published by JCapps Digital.

JCapps Digital is responsible for the app itself, including its selection system, corpus processing, interface, backend services, privacy practices and support.

Questions about The Infinite can be sent to [email protected] .