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Cosmologically Unique IDs

jasonfantl.com

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Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs

#2

Post by adityaathalye »

Just past page 281 of Becky Chambers's delightful "the galaxy, and the ground within".

  Received Message
  Encryption: 0
  From: GC Transit Authority --- Gora System (path: 487-45411-479-4)
  To: Ooli Oht Ouloo (path: 5787-598-66)
  Subject: URGENT UPDATE
Man I love the series.

Looks like this multispecies universe has centrally-agreed-upon path addressing system.

Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs

#3

Post by j-pb »

Great insights and visualisations!

I build a whole database around the idea of using the smallest plausible random identifiers, because that seems to be the only "golden disk" we have for universal communication, except for maybe some convergence property of latent spaces with large enough embodied foundation models.

It's weird that they are really under appreciated in the scientific data management and library science community, and many issues that require large organisations at the moment could just have been better identifiers.

To me the ship of Theseus question is about extrinsic (random / named) identifiers vs. intrinsic (hash / embedding) identifiers.

https://triblespace.github.io/triblespace-rs/deep-dive/ident...

https://triblespace.github.io/triblespace-rs/deep-dive/tribl...

Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs

#4

Post by ktpsns »

Quite offtopic, but: I found UUIDs being overused in many cases. People then abused them to store data, making them effectively "speaking IDs" or "multi column indices".

Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs

#5

Post by bluecoconut »

Fun read.

One upside of the deterministic schemes is they include provenance/lineage. Can literally "trace up" the path the history back to the original ID giver.

Kinda has me curious about how much information is required to represent any arbitrary provenance tree/graph on a network of N-nodes/objects (entirely via the self-described ID)?

(thinking in the comment: I guess if worst case linear chain, and you assume that the information of the full provenance should be accessible by the id, that scales as O(N x id_size), so its quite bad. But, assuming "best case" (that any node is expected to be log(N) steps from root, depth of log(N)) feels like global_id_size = log(N) x local_id_size is roughly the optimal limit? so effectively the size of the global_id grows as log(N)^2? Would that mean: from the 399 bit number, with lineage, would be a lower limit for a global_id_size be like (400 bit)^2 ~= 20 kB (because of carrying the ordered-local-id provenance information, and not relative to local shared knowledge)

Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs

#6

Post by Octoth0rpe »

adityaathalye wrote: post #2

Just past page 281 of Becky Chambers's delightful "the galaxy, and the ground within" . Received Message Encryption: 0 From: GC Transit Authority --- Gora System (path: 487-45411-479-4) To: Ooli Oht Ouloo (path: 5787-598-66) Subject: URGENT UPDATE Man I love the series. Looks like this multispecies universe has centrally-agreed-upon path addressing system.

From this book in particular, I love the scene with everyone sitting around talking about how horrifying the concept of cheese is. The rest of the quartet is wonderful, with the second book (A Closed and Common Orbit) being the MVP IMO.

Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs

#7

Post by lisper »

This analysis is not quite fair. It takes into account locality (i.e. the speed of light) when designing UUID schemes but not when computing the odds of a collision. Collisions only matter if the colliding UUIDs actually come into causal contact with each other after being generated. So just as you have to take locality into account when designing UUID trees, you also have to take it into account when computing the odds of an actual local collision. So a naive application of the birthday paradox is not applicable because that ignores locality. So an actual fair calculation of the required size of a random UUID is going to be a lot smaller than the ~800 bits the article comes up with. I haven't done the math, but I'd be surprised if the actual answer is more than 256 bits.

(Gotta say here that I love HN. It's one of the very few places where a comment that geeky and pedantic can nonetheless be on point. :-)

Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs

#9

Post by jmole »

ktpsns wrote: post #4

Quite offtopic, but: I found UUIDs being overused in many cases. People then abused them to store data, making them effectively "speaking IDs" or "multi column indices".

Unless it's a key that needs to be sortable (e.g. insertion order) or a metric/descriptor of some kind, I'm not sure why UUID would be overused or inappropriate for use.

Re: Cosmologically Unique IDs

#10

Post by manofmanysmiles »

I'd propose using our current view of physical reality to own a subset of the UIID + version field if new physics is discovered.

10-20 bits: version/epoch

10-20 bits: cosmic region

40 bits: galaxy ID

40 bits: stellar/planetary address

64 bits: local timestamp

This avoids the potentially pathological long chain of provenance, and also encodes coordinates into it.

Every billion years or so it probably makes sense to re-partion.

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