On 2010\08\02 18:02, Theo Markettos wrote:
Basil wrote:
On 2010\08\02 11:30, Theo Markettos wrote:
Should that go to Newport (Isle of Wight), Newport (Gwent), Newport
(Telford& Wrekin), Newport (Hants) or Newport (Essex)? How many
places do you have to send the letter around to find if a Mr Jones lives
there?

Since you're the post office, and you delivered the mail yesterday and
the day before, you should know which Station Road has a Mr Jones in it,
i.e. the person's name is a checksum.

Indeed. But do you ring up the delivery offices in each of those places and
try to get through to the postie who happens to do that round? Or do you
play (literal!) pass-the-parcel around all the various possible sorting
offices until you find one who recognise the name? Which could take weeks
(for example, if a postie was on holiday).

No, the scanner that currently does OCR on the postcode of every letter
would also do OCR on the text that precedes the postcode and store every
combination to allow subsequent comparison on letters where the postcode
is unreadable.