Long string to short ID

[Yao Bao]

Hello,

I think the problem comes from the fundamental differences between our physical world and computing world.

We do copy things in both worlds. In computing world, two copies are really identical, but this is not true in physical world. Two physical copies of one book are different, they are the same for humans (we think so), but the fact is the opposite.

How about taking the book title or even the book content as an atom (suppose we have unlimited storage...)? Then they might become unique, a little bit like our physical copies. Well, strictly speaking, the are not, we haven’t count the time yet...

How to uniquely reference or finding things is extremely difficult, we have to have some precision losing in computing world though. So we have things like GUID in general or reference in Erlang.

Cheers,
Yao