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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, M

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.
- dalke 10y ago
  I can think of two phases. First, the problem is with people who don't have an address. They currently have to say "send an ambulance to the blue building just above the X gas station near the police station in west Y". Having some sort of address - even with ambiguity! - is better than now. And we don't know if there is local ambiguity. (Also, dialects make a difference. My dialect has "pen/pin" as a homonym. Rhoticity adds another layer of complications.) Then again, we already have homonym problems. For example, "Greene St." vs "Green St." Newark, Jersey City, NYC, and Brooklyn each have one or the other, within a span of a few miles. For the ambulance problem, E911 system in the US has a rough idea of where you are calling from, and can help disambiguate. Which means we know it's possible to build a system on top of similar names. But the first step is to get some names.
dsl 10y ago
My home address ends in "slips." Remove the s and you are in Missouri.
- oskarpearson 10y ago
  I'm guessing you aren't in Missouri, then? :)

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.

dalke 10y ago
I can think of two phases. First, the problem is with people who don't have an address. They currently have to say "send an ambulance to the blue building just above the X gas station near the police station in west Y". Having some sort of address - even with ambiguity! - is better than now. And we don't know if there is local ambiguity. (Also, dialects make a difference. My dialect has "pen/pin" as a homonym. Rhoticity adds another layer of complications.) Then again, we already have homonym problems. For example, "Greene St." vs "Green St." Newark, Jersey City, NYC, and Brooklyn each have one or the other, within a span of a few miles. For the ambulance problem, E911 system in the US has a rough idea of where you are calling from, and can help disambiguate. Which means we know it's possible to build a system on top of similar names. But the first step is to get some names.

dsl 10y ago

My home address ends in "slips." Remove the s and you are in Missouri.

oskarpearson 10y ago
I'm guessing you aren't in Missouri, then? :)