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 mining now
Just want to mine?
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microprediction/muid/master/examples/mine_from_venv.sh)"
If it fails you might need Python 3
ruby -e "$(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.
