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adityaathalye 2026-02-18 19:13 UTC link

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

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Man I love the series.

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

j-pb 2026-02-18 19:16 UTC link

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...

ktpsns 2026-02-18 19:27 UTC link

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".

bluecoconut 2026-02-18 19:29 UTC link

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)

lisper 2026-02-18 19:33 UTC link

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. :-)

alex_tech92 2026-02-18 19:58 UTC link

It is interesting how much of our infrastructure relies on the assumption that 'close enough' is actually 'good enough' for uniqueness. When we move from UUIDs to things like ULIDs or Snowflake IDs, we are really just trading off coordination cost for a slightly higher collision risk that we will likely never hit in several lifetimes. Thinking about it on a 'cosmological' scale makes you realize how much of a luxury local generation is without needing a central authority. It is that tiny bit of entropy that keeps the whole distributed system from grinding to a halt.

factotvm 2026-02-18 20:00 UTC link

> In order to fix this, we might start sending out satellites in every direction

Minor correction: Satellites don't go in every direction; they orbit. Probes or spaceships are more appropriate terms.

ekipan 2026-02-18 20:15 UTC link

I forget the context but the other day I also learned about Snowflake IDs [1] that are apparently used by Twitter, Discord, Instagram, and Mastodon.

Timestamp + random seems like it could be a good tradeoff to reduce the ID sizes and still get reasonable characteristics, I'm surprised the article didn't explore there (but then again "timestamps" are a lot more nebulous at universal scale I suppose). Just spitballing here but I wonder if it would be worthwhile to reclaim ten bits of the Snowflake timestamp and use the low 32 bits for a random number. Four billion IDs for each second.

There's a Tom Scott video [2] that describes Youtube video IDs as 11-digit base-64 random numbers, but I don't see any official documentation about that. At the end he says how many IDs are available but I don't think he considers collisions via the birthday paradox.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowflake_ID

[2]: https://youtu.be/gocwRvLhDf8

rini17 2026-02-18 20:21 UTC link

From real life we know that people prefer to have multiple anonymous IDs, or self-selected handles, either makes fully deterministic generation schemes moot.

Also, network routing requires objects that have multiple addresses.

Physics side of whole thing is funny too, afaik quantum particles require fungibility, i.e. by doxxing atoms you unavoidably change the behavior of the system.

m4nu3l 2026-02-18 21:03 UTC link

A more realistic estimate of the total number of addressable things should take into account that for anything to be addressable, its address should be stored somewhere at least once.

If it takes at least Npb particles to store one bit of information, then the number of addressable things would decrease with the number of bits of the address.

So let's call Nthg the number of addressable things, and assume the average number of bits per address grows with Nb = f(Ntng).

Then the maximum number of addressable things is the number that satisfies Nthg = Np/(Npb*f(Ntng)), where Np is the total number of particles.

vessenes 2026-02-18 23:16 UTC link

Chiming in from the decentralized world - there’s an adversarial / cooperative dynamic in the assignment of these IDs - and the selection of parents, not discussed in the original. I think you could possibly get to sub linear by allowing a small number of cooperative nodes to assign new IDs.

On the contrary, having the right to assign IDs is powerful; on balance, to my mind the right thing to do is some sort of a ZK verifiable random function, e.g. sunspot-based transformations combined with some proof of ‘fair’ random choice. In that case, I think the 800 bit number seems like plenty. You could also do some sort of epoch-based variable length, where for the next billion years or so, we use 1/256 of the ID space, (forced first bit to 0), and so on.

stonegray 2026-02-18 23:26 UTC link

Specifying a CSPRNG as an entropy source to avoid collision is incorrect.

CSPRNGs make prediction of the next number difficult (cracking-AES difficulty) but do not add entropy and must be seeded uniquely otherwise they will output the same numbers. Unless the author is proposing having the same machine generate a single universe-scale list in one run.

Also “banning” ids that are all 1s or 0s is silly; they are just as valid and unique as any other number if you’re generating them properly. Although I might suggest purchasing a lottery ticket if you get an UUID with all settable bits as 1.

MagicMoonlight 2026-02-19 00:05 UTC link

The obvious solution is a system like IP addresses. Every system has an address like universe.galaxy.region.system or whatever, then the system is subdivided in whatever way is logical for that system.

That way you can route ships or data or whatever to a specific system in a logical way. Each system decides how to allocate addresses. Since most systems won’t have anything or anyone to care, something like NASA or registrars would just allocate a block to the system and give large things like planets an address.

linuxhansl 2026-02-19 03:36 UTC link

Heh. I once had to make an argument that 256 bit randomly assigned identifiers are good enough without explicit collision checking. People wanted me to add complex and expensive collision checks.

My argument was the 2^256 actually approaches the number of atom in the observable universe (within 1 to 3 orders of magnitude), and that collisions are so unlikely that we'll have millions of datacenter meltdowns first (all assuming we have a good source of random numbers, of course). In the end I convinced everybody that even 128 bits are good enough, without any collision checking required.

I thought my arguments was clever, but this is so much better. :)

kelseyfrog 2026-02-19 04:36 UTC link

The Dewey section and Elias omega encoding was fun, but it reminded me of Project Xanadu's tumblers[1] - a variable length dotted notion where each segment is unbounded.

Tumblers are modeled using transfinite numbers which makes me wonder: what are the similarities and differences between transfinite numbers and Elias omega encoding? I'm not well versed in either, so I expect it's either a question from ignorance or I may have a lot to learn. :)

1. https://www.artandpopularculture.com/Tumbler_%28Project_Xana...

kmoser 2026-02-19 04:46 UTC link

> A more reasonable upper limit might be to assume that every atom in the observable universe will get one ID (we assume atoms won’t be assigned multiple IDs throughout time, which is a concession). There are an estimated atoms in the universe. Using the same equation as above, we find that we need 532 bits to avoid (probabilistically) a collision up to that point.

This doesn't take into account that you will inevitably want to assign unique IDs to various groups of atoms (e.g. this microchip, that car, etc.). And don't even get me started on assigning unique IDs to each subatomic particle.

cuttothechase 2026-02-19 06:22 UTC link

One could take anything like a cell and split it into genes, molecules, atoms, sub-atomic wave functions (with infinite value range) and take time which can be split into another infinite entity say even within a finite interval. How does this analysis account for that?

I could split this object into 10^500 or 10^50^500^5000 etc., with imagination being the limit.

These values Id'd at whatever imaginable resolution are far from practically useful but at a cosmic scale, there is no telling what is a useful value?

So this framework seems to be more limiting because we define a resolution ?

moktonar 2026-02-19 08:20 UTC link

The random uuid selection is far superior because of lifespan, you can only have so many functioning devices at the same time, and on the contrary to tree-based uuids once a device is decommissioned the uuid can be reclaimed. Practically though it would probably be a mixed algorithm where positioning would give the id root and the rest is selected randomly

program_whiz 2026-02-19 12:49 UTC link

Is it possible to construct an ID using some kind of centralized observable phenomena? Due to how time and distance distinguish things, would they always be unique? Like only one person will ever simultaneously observe stars in certain positions and intensities, color, etc. Similar to how I've heard some companies use lava lamps or other noisy processes to generate entropy.

I guess I'm wondering if there is a way to construct a universal coordinate frame for the whole universe? If so, then its possible to trivially assign local time + x + y + z + salt to make unique ids.

notepad0x90 2026-02-19 12:53 UTC link

Use a deck of cards for representation. 52 digits where 'K♠' for king-of-spades would be one character in Unicode. it isn't just cosmological unique, it's easier to read, harder to edit manually, and easier for our pattern recognition to keep track of.

And best feature: anyone can generate a random id of such representation by getting a deck of cards and shuffling it properly. Playing cards are ubiquitous. I can see a camera "reading" the decks after they've been splayed on a table after a shuffle. This might even make a better random number seeds.

You're not sure if there is any demand for this sort of stuff? Look at dicekeys:

https://dicekeys.com/