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Naming All Lifeforms On Earth With Hash Functions

Posted by timothy on from the sort-of-a-nickname dept.

First time accepted submitter ssasa writes "A Virginia Tech researcher is proposing a new naming system for all life on earth [based on each organism's] genetic fingerprint — basically something like a hash function of an organism. Hash functions are in common use in software development. Hopefully it will pass some time before we see a hash collision between a cat and some dinosaur."

2 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Names are for communication by Chemisor · · Score: 4, Funny

    I think I'll go hunt some af7caaf1e73a2d24924371a370b4ef9b so I can feed my 362842c5bb3847ec3fbdecb7a84a8692 and a nice quiet evening with my 34b46c8cf192431e84ea81109660367b, chatting about the difficulty of talking about a474fb23f886eeaa16223eba872e53b1 that some socially inept scientist decided to name with a hash function.

    1. Re:Names are for communication by Darinbob · · Score: 3, Funny

      It all tastes like 518bf09f107329cef14fd9c9dbddab3c anyway.