3 ms·

I don't think meaningless combinations of three words are particularly human friendly either...

• superuser2 10y ago
  They are. Remembering a three-word phrase is not remotely difficult compared to remembering a long pseudorandom string.
  • themihai 10y ago
    Are the words english only? Hoe are they translated?
    • danielvf 10y ago
      They are translated per language. Horse in English becomes морь in Mongolian.
      • danielvf 10y ago
        Apparently I read wrongly somewhere.
    • drivers99 10y ago
      "Thus far, the system has been built in 10 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Swahili, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish, and, starting next month [article is from Nov 2015], Arabic" http://qz.com/561727/an-address-for-every-place-in-the-world-using-just-three-words/ http://qz.com/561727/an-address-for-every-place-in-the-world... Also: "Each square has its identity in its own language that is not a translation of another."
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • bsg75 10y ago
    Except they appear to use the plural and non-plural words forms as different coordinates. Thats going to cause some confusion.
    • benologist 10y ago
      Except the alternative is probably even worse, so it might be a net reduction in confusion - here in Costa Rica my address is a lengthy sentence of directions from a locally well known school nearby!
      • solotronics 10y ago
        I came here to specifically make a comment about costa rica! I love CR even with its lack of street addresses. How do you typically receive packages?
        • benologist 10y ago
          Amazon Global will deliver most things right to my door now and it's surprisingly inexpensive shipping + customs taxes (in some categories). Hard part is finding stuff that ships directly, they have a checkbox to filter for international shipping but it's not completely accurate. Shipping time is 2 - 3 weeks minimum. For everything else and stuff Amazon doesn't ship I use Aerocasillas or a PO box at the post office. Aerocasillas are pricey but they do their job and fast, something arriving at their address in Miami on Monday is usually available to pickup by Friday. The post office recently didn't tell us about a package my sister sent until after they'd sent it back lol.
    • jessriedel 10y ago
      Yea, they needed to use plural and other modifiers to get sufficient bits. I would have gone with 4 words, and make them shorter on average.
  • discreditable 10y ago
    Ironically, the article manages to mess this up. > the Stade de France is at reporter.smoked.received The phrase they mention goes to some place in Trenton, Missouri[1]. It seems they meant reporter.smoker.received[2]. [1] https://map.what3words.com/reporter.smoked.received https://map.what3words.com/reporter.smoked.received [2] https://map.what3words.com/reporter.smoker.received https://map.what3words.com/reporter.smoker.received
    • saalweachter 10y ago
      I was actually reasonably impressed with the system; they don't put nearby words near each other, so if you have a typo it becomes pretty obvious to anything but the most braindead delivery system. So if what you're writing on the envelope is Bob Smith reporter.smoked.received France it becomes trivial to correct that to reporter.smoker.received, unlike when you write "124 Main Street" instead of "123 Main Street".
      • huac 10y ago
        > they don't put nearby words near each other Are we sure? They could do something like a Levenshtein distance correction, but they also might not have.
      • huac 10y ago
        > they don't put nearby words near each other Are we sure? They could do something like a Levenshtein distance correction, but they also might not have.
      • discreditable 10y ago
        To what3words' credit, when I typed reporter.smoker.received into the map tool, it did suggest the correct location in its list of similar locations. https://imgur.com/G2ChrxA.png https://imgur.com/G2ChrxA.png
    • rudolf0 10y ago
      Right. What happens when you call 911 and they send the ambulance to "gravy.sun.request" instead of "gravy.sun.requests" or whatever? The odds of such a similar name being located in the same city are low, so they'd probably notice the discrepancy, but there's still a lot of room for error in communicating the words, since they're not normalizing singular/plural or tenses.
  • visarga 10y ago
    Yes, three-word phrases have more cues for memory. They mean more than a random string of numbers. It also looks similar to a method for improving memory, by finding weird mnemonics. Weird is memorable, and more meaning acts like a checksum to reduce errors.
• chrischen 10y ago
  Especially English meaningless combinations for 3 words. If you don't know English it might as well be a set of numbers, except you'd also have to memorize the 26 letter alphabet.