> You can't decide where to deliver an item in any other way.
Only if you’re a robot, which postal workers aren't. They can use local context, such as no one lives at address X so they must have meant address Y. Or even, person at address X has a birthday this week, so this envelop that looks like a birthday card, and has their misspelled name on it, is obviously for address X not address Y.
I’ve had our friendly postal worker deliver post correctly to me, despite having a throughly munged and incorrect address, because she recognised my name, and knew someone with a similar name didn’t live at the more obvious interpretation of the incorrect address.
So address parsing and mail delivery is an extremely human and imprecise process. Full of nuance and edge cases that can’t even be observed, unless you actually follow the humans making deliveries and see what they’re doing.
> Or even, person at address X has a birthday this week, so this envelop that looks like a birthday card, and has their misspelled name on it, is obviously for address X not address Y.
That seems awfully contextual and ad-hoc. Surely this mechanism won't work in many instances unless you only receive mail on your birthday. It's a nice thing if it sometimes succeeds even when it shouldn't, but that's not something you can rely on. And should you get a different mail worker who doesn't know you, poof, your mail is gone.
> I’ve had our friendly postal worker deliver post correctly to me, despite having a throughly munged and incorrect address, because she recognised my name, and knew someone with a similar name didn’t live at the more obvious interpretation of the incorrect address.
Considering that this was presumably a problem with an address written on a physical item as a linear text, that's not quite in the purview of the problems that I'm trying to solve for my own application which needs to process physical addresses of objects (sometimes not even involving people in any way). So I can't comment on mail delivery specifically, sadly.
Yup, but that’s never stopped someone from relying on a method in the past. The vast majority of addresses aren't written by engineers. If you sent a letter using an address once, and it worked, then most people will just assume it'll always work. How would they know any better?
> It's a nice thing if it sometimes succeeds even when it shouldn't, but that's not something you can rely on.
Have you seen the internet? Or even just HTML? The entire world relies on things working when they shouldn’t. We can talk all day about the merits of that approach, but it wont change reality.
> Considering that this was presumably a problem with an address written on a physical item as a linear text
The text was printed perfectly if thats what your saying. It was just wrong. Some system somewhere had attempted to manipulate it, and ended up misinterpreting the original address, and produced something completely wrong as a result.
> I'm trying to solve for my own application which needs to process physical addresses of objects
That’s slightly different, and presumably you own far more of the process thats producing and interpreting these addresses. I’ve worked in systems that had to deal with addresses created by normal people, and let me tell you, normal people have a very diverse view on how to write addresses.
> That seems awfully contextual and ad-hoc. Surely this mechanism won't work in many instances unless you only receive mail on your birthday.
No, you're only more likely to receive stuff that looks like birthday cards on or around your birthday.
But, forget the birthday -- your earlier statement:
>>> To me there seems to be a contradiction in those two statements. By definition, an address is written
...is already contradicted if the postal worker just recognizes your name, and knows that you live at your actual address and not the one the written one more resembles. Your name isn't written in the address itself.
Only if you’re a robot, which postal workers aren't. They can use local context, such as no one lives at address X so they must have meant address Y. Or even, person at address X has a birthday this week, so this envelop that looks like a birthday card, and has their misspelled name on it, is obviously for address X not address Y.
I’ve had our friendly postal worker deliver post correctly to me, despite having a throughly munged and incorrect address, because she recognised my name, and knew someone with a similar name didn’t live at the more obvious interpretation of the incorrect address.
So address parsing and mail delivery is an extremely human and imprecise process. Full of nuance and edge cases that can’t even be observed, unless you actually follow the humans making deliveries and see what they’re doing.