Steve Jackson Games Forums - View Single Post - Ship's Registration Papers from FAR TRADER

Anaraxes · 04-30-2019, 07:06 AM

It makes sense, and is workable. How else might you do it?

The drawback to coded numbering schemes (where there's a bunch of fields in the number with independent values that mean different things) is that they're inefficient. Everybody's joked at some point about why their utility company needs a 30-digit account number. I once did some database work for an organization that had 26-digit account numbers to represent a few hundred accounts (rather than 10^26 sources and sinks...)

The most efficient scheme is just to allocate serial numbers with no coding whatsoever. The number means nothing, and your central point of administration just makes they don't hand out the same one twice. You only need as many bits as you need to count all the objects you're numbering.

So, real-world organizations that don't have a centralized point of administration in real time (which the Imperium certainly can't) often compromise with a scheme where they hand out blocks of numbers to some sub-administrator. Examples would be the US Social Security Number (the first three digits originally were a geographic code for states; the last four were a serial number assigned as states issued them; the middle two are complicated; since 2011, they've just handed out blocks without even that much coding) or Internet IP addresses (where the IETF hands out a range of numbers to a company, ISP, etc., then that organization has to eventually wind up assigning numbers to individual computers as they see fit) or MAC addresses for Ethernet devices. These as essentially hybrid schemes, where you could look at the blocks as a code for different areas/groups/whatever (though a single entity might well get assigned multiple blocks, so it's not 1:1 as in the fully coded case). So not quite as efficient, not quite as easy to decode into a meaning.

04-30-2019, 07:06 AM	#4
Anaraxes Join Date: Sep 2007	Re: Ship's Registration Papers from FAR TRADER It makes sense, and is workable. How else might you do it? The drawback to coded numbering schemes (where there's a bunch of fields in the number with independent values that mean different things) is that they're inefficient. Everybody's joked at some point about why their utility company needs a 30-digit account number. I once did some database work for an organization that had 26-digit account numbers to represent a few hundred accounts (rather than 10^26 sources and sinks...) The most efficient scheme is just to allocate serial numbers with no coding whatsoever. The number means nothing, and your central point of administration just makes they don't hand out the same one twice. You only need as many bits as you need to count all the objects you're numbering. So, real-world organizations that don't have a centralized point of administration in real time (which the Imperium certainly can't) often compromise with a scheme where they hand out blocks of numbers to some sub-administrator. Examples would be the US Social Security Number (the first three digits originally were a geographic code for states; the last four were a serial number assigned as states issued them; the middle two are complicated; since 2011, they've just handed out blocks without even that much coding) or Internet IP addresses (where the IETF hands out a range of numbers to a company, ISP, etc., then that organization has to eventually wind up assigning numbers to individual computers as they see fit) or MAC addresses for Ethernet devices. These as essentially hybrid schemes, where you could look at the blocks as a code for different areas/groups/whatever (though a single entity might well get assigned multiple blocks, so it's not 1:1 as in the fully coded case). So not quite as efficient, not quite as easy to decode into a meaning.