2022-01-06
A UUID is just a list of 128 bits. That is 2^128 different combinations (340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456). This big number is apparently ‘340 undecillion’. Incidentially, there are also 2^128 ipV6 addreses. Hopefully it’ll take a while for us to go through those…
Under the hood, a UUID is just a load of 1s or 0s (much like anything in a computer). It’s just a string of 128 of them. Eg.
01011011011010001011001111010011000101100011001001000110111110111010011101111001111000001011100101111101010100110010100111010111Isn’t that fascinating?
This loads of bits can also be rewritten in base 16 (hexidecimal)
5b68b3d3163246fba779e0b97d5329d7…which is also the base 10 (“normal” number) of
121503393765045762381299543010238998999These are the same number, just expressed differently.
Each hexidecimal number (1-16 or 0-f) represets four bits (2^4 = 16). So hexidecimal is four times shorter and therefore a sensible standard to use for uinque identifiers.
I wanted to work out the probability that two UUIDs contained the
same prefix. Because hexidecimal is base 16, it makes sense that for
every UUID, 1 in 16 should start with a. And 1 in 16 should
start with 5, etc. But what about two aa? How
do we calculate that? This would be 16 * 16, which
256. So there’d be a 1 in 256 chance of getting a UUID
starting with aa.
The pattern we can extrapolate is that for n digits, we
need to multiply 16 together n times.
Luckily maths people do this sort of sum a lot and there’s a
shorthand for it, ^ (this process is called
exponentiation).
I spend a lot of time in emacs and in emacs, lisp is just a keystroke
away. If you write (+ 5 5), put your cursor on the closing
bracket and then press C-x C-e (control x followed by
control e), you’ll evaluate the lisp you just wrote and the minibuffer
will display 10.
I googled the exponentiation lisp operator (which was handily called
expt) and typed the following:
(expt 16 1)which gave the answer 16.
I tried again with a diferent number and the function seemed to work /
Using an emacs macro, I was able to generate a small table of these.
(expt 16 1) 16
(expt 16 4) 65536
(expt 16 8) 4294967296
(expt 16 12) 281474976710656
(expt 16 16) 18446744073709551616
(expt 16 20) 1208925819614629174706176
(expt 16 24) 79228162514264337593543950336
(expt 16 28) 5192296858534827628530496329220096
(expt 16 32) 340282366920938463463374607431768211456This list showing the total number of unique combinations of base-16 numbers helped me decide how best to categorise UUID prefixes for something 👍