If I understand this correctly, this basically uses the drawer's perceived number as an out-of-band signalling mechanism for the algorithm they agreed to follow. Each actor must adhere to the same scheme to address drawers. This means that the drawers must either be uniquely named ("labelled" ahead of time), or have some sort of natural ordering that's algorithmically deterministic (e.g. lexicographic, array index, 2D-position using a previously agreed algorithm like right-then-down).
What are some practical uses for this? Distributed hash table traversal using one's own address [1]?