Project note
About this atlas
plates.autos is a university combinatorics project. It teaches how United States passenger license-plate serials are built: letter slots, digit slots, skipped glyphs, mixed-radix rank, and neighbours. It is not a department of motor vehicles, not a people-search, and not a list of cars.
The working domain is https://plates.autos. Pages are ordinary PHP files meant to be uploaded over FTP. There is no application framework, no Composer tree, and no database. A combination URL such as SPR 9932 in Texas is computed from a published pattern, then filled with tables that only that string can produce.
A million pages that each say “this is a license plate” would be thin content. The atlas instead nests documents:
/texas/ → /texas/license-plate-format/ → /texas/license-plate-combinations/ → /texas/license-plate-combinations/spr-9932/
The leaf is a generated example. Refreshing it does not mint a new identity for SPR 9932; it only redraws the similar-combination module so the crawl graph can grow. Catalogue grids on state pages are seeded, so crawlers see a stable set of URLs alongside the random strip.
What we refuse to invent
- Owner names, addresses, or telephone numbers
- Vehicle identification numbers, insurance, or liens
- A claim that a string is currently bolted to a bumper
- A live query against any state registration file
Read the methodology, the generated versus issued note, and the disclaimer before citing a page as evidence of anything other than format math.