I always thought generating unique IDs based on information (such as hashed IDs for web requests) was taxing for me -- but when I have a system with no structure but 'try to be memorable to a human', it gets much, much worse.
I have a system worked out now, though -- LDD-LDD-LDD, where L's are letters and D's are digits. Even using only consonants for the first and last letters and using only vowels for the middle, it generates some 246 million unique IDs, which is way more than I'm going to need any time in the near future.
I'm going to have to test this with some people, maybe move the digits around (for some reason, this enhances memorization -- look at phone numbers).
You should be safe
Humans on average can remember no more than 7 or 8 things in a group. They do however have the ability to see smaller groups as single entities. For instance - international telephone numbers
011639204351234 (ficticious # in the Philippines)
011 - international
63 - country code
920 - equivalent of an area code
435 - just like US
1234 - just like US
This 15 digit number just became only 5.
Theoretically, this means that an average person should not have to exert a great deal of effort to learn a 49 to 64 sequence of things. The trouble is we tend to make smaller groups of 2/3/4. For instance, I know the following digits of pi from memory
3.1415926535897932384626
14 15 9 26535 897 932 384 626
And I have on a number of occassions tried to commit more numbers to memory but these are the ones I am always sure of. This isn't to say if I worked hard at it, I couldn't memorize more - but hey, with that many digits I could already calculate the circumference of the universe with the precision of no more than a atom's width of error
;-)
Humans also tend to only visually recognize up to 4 things (unless they are ordered to give cues). Place a number of dots on a piece of paper randomly and ask someone to tell you how many there are without counting them. No problem with 1, 2, 3, 4
At 5 it gets shakey and goes downhill from here.
In any case - I think LDDD-LDDD-LDDD should be fine.
Cheers
L~R
Re:You should be safe
cog on 2004-10-07T15:05:29
with that many digits I could already calculate the circumference of the universe with the precision of no more than a atom's width of error
I dare you do it :-)
