Hilbert’s Grand Hotel shows that a fully occupied hotel with infinitely many rooms can accommodate additional guests. But our analyze finds that this is not true. Let us illustrate Hilbert’s Grand Hotel in Figure 1 where each square is a room and is occupied. Suppose that the rooms of the hotel are numbered 1, 2, 3 … . We call the guest of the room 1 guest 1, the guest of the room 2 guest 2, the guest of the room n guest n and so on. The new guest is called guest G.

Let us analyze this paradox with a first case where the occupant of each room accepts to shift to the next room. When the guest G arrives and asks for a room, according to David Hilbert, the hotelkeeper will move the guest 1 to room 2 and accommodate the guest G in room 1, then move the guest 2 to room 3 to accommodate the guest 1, and so on. The general way is to move the guest n-1 to the room n to accommodate the guest n-2. This way the guest G is accommodated while all the old guests still has a room.

Let us show this procedure of room shifting with Figure 2. The room shifting is done step by step. The guest G takes the room 1, the guest 1 takes the room 2 and so on. At the step n-1, the guest n-1 is before the door of the room n. At each step from 1 to n-1, the guests 1 to n-1 are successively out of room. This is true for all n, however big n is. So, at any step one guest is out, which is shown in Figure 2.

Let us consider the case where no guest accepts to leave his room, see Figure 2. The guest G will knock successively every room. As no guest lets him in, he will knock the next room forever. In consequence, he will be out of room while going to infinitely far. This is illustrated by the letter G before the rows of rooms. So, the guest G is always out.

In the first case, it was the guests 1, 2, 3… that are out of room at each step. In the second case it is always the guest G who is out of room. So, in both cases one guest is out of room at every step, that is, there is a guest before the room n no matter how big the number n is. This means that one additional guest in Hilbert’s Grand Hotel is not accommodated even he goes to infinitely far. In other words, Hilbert’s Grand Hotel cannot accommodate additional guest in its infinitely many rooms.

For more detail of this study please read the complete paper here:

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