Thread: Weird cardinality q

A "book" is a finite string of characters from some finite "alphabet," such as the 128-character ASCII system. Is the set B of all possible "books" finite, countably infinite, uncountable?

Would it be finite as the product of two finite sets is finite?

The set of all books is countable. For simplicity, just to get the idea across, consider the alphabet with only two elements. You can then construct a bijection between and in the following way:








...

The key observation is that, since the string is finite, there's only a finite number of books with a given string length.

Originally Posted by sfspitfire23

A "book" is a finite string of characters from some finite "alphabet," such as the 128-character ASCII system. Is the set B of all possible "books" finite, countably infinite, uncountable?

Would it be finite as the product of two finite sets is finite?

The books can be put in lexigraphic order (or can be generated in this order), and so the set of all books is countably infinite.

CB

Originally Posted by sfspitfire23

A "book" is a finite string of characters from some finite "alphabet," such as the 128-character ASCII system. Is the set B of all possible "books" finite, countably infinite, uncountable?

This looks awfully similar to the last question you posted.

Would it be finite as the product of two finite sets is finite?

The product of two finite sets is evidently finite, but I don't see how that's relevant.