README.md

muid

Memorable Unique Identifiers

Wait you say ... that's an oxymoron

Memorable unique identifiers are a provocative misnomer. Yes, memorability is antithetical to uniqueness, and MUIDs might be better termed "hash-memorable" identifiers: identifiers whose SHA-256 hashes are in part memorable. There is a cheesy video explanation at https://vimeo.com/397352413

Start participating in the prediction network immediately

Cut and paste into a bash script

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://tinyurl.com/32jjebu9)"

If it fails you might need Python 3

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
brew install python

Using the library directly

As per https://muid.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ ...

Install

pip install muid

Hash-memorability

>>> muid.bhash(b'f601f291896bb66b8a3c3d783077713a')
b'56a33411a3ae7cfc95597911708358ad'

Don't see it?

>>> muid.pretty(b'56a33411a3ae7cfc95597911708358ad',k1=6,k2=5)
'Shammy Llama'

Create one MUID

>>> muid.create(difficulty=8, with_report=True)
[{'length': 8, 'pretty': 'Thof Clam', 'key': b'79f7faf8d1272b94eaac367972a09f7b', 'hash': b'760fc1a3368216b67a044e3d4da1fd85'}]

String version of hash

Use shash instead of bhash

>>> muid.shash('f601f291896bb66b8a3c3d783077713a')
56a33411a3ae7cfc95597911708358ad

Validation

>>> muid.animal(b'f601f291896bb66b8a3c3d783077713a')
'Shammy Llama'

>>> muid.validate(b'f601f291896bb66b8a3c3d783077713a')
True

Mining for multiple MUIDs

Runs forever and produces MUIDs of increasing length.

>>> muid.mine()

{'hash': b'56a33411a3ae7cfc95597911708358ad',
'key': b'f601f291896bb66b8a3c3d783077713a',
'length': 11,
'pretty': 'Shammy Llama'}

{'hash': b'6ea176470adcff53855f04181bca1a1b',
'key': b'fb74baf628d43892020d803614f91f29',
'length': 11,
'pretty': 'Healthy Toad'}

{'hash': b'a3e76457c0de70a153e82067845f1527',
'key': b'769adf0f307181e4ab2bc4c1b991cdc6',
'length': 11,
'pretty': 'Amethyst Cod'}

Bequeath unwanted MUIDs to a worthy statistician.

Applications

See the video at https://vimeo.com/397352413 for some motivation.

We hope you have an application that can benefit from one less join.

Implementation decisions

We welcome thoughtful suggestions at https://github.com/microprediction/muid/issues

Choice of hash

We truncate the output of hashlib.sha256 For example muid.shash('abe5') is equivalent to

sha256('abe5'.encode('ascii')).hexdigest()[:32]

Readable hex

Hex	Human	Hex	HUman	Hex	Human
1	l	5	s	9	g
2	z	6	h	0	o
3	m	7	t
4	y	8	x

Miscellaneous

Collisions

MUID collision requires approximately the same computational capacity as UUID collision, or more.

Thus unlikely to be an issue.