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I can understand why someone would want to run WhatFreeWords if What3Words is already a standard: it's dumb to pay for 238-lines-of-Python-as-a-service. The add

I can understand why someone would want to run WhatFreeWords if What3Words is already a standard: it's dumb to pay for 238-lines-of-Python-as-a-service. The added latency alone is ridiculous. My question is, why would anyone commit to What3Words as a standard? There are much simpler ways to map geographic data to three-word combinations. One obvious way, dividing things up into rough "squares" of approximately even size, has the added benefit that shared or alphabetically proximal words would indicate geographical proximity: with What3Words, wounds.client.face is feet away from to jumped.storm.nest, but hundreds of miles from wounds.client.fact. If you don't think that's useful, then perhaps it's useful to use one of the other word lists which are on many computers, to share space, such as the PGP Word List[1] or the word list from RFC 1760[2]. One of the touted benefits of What3Words is that it is algorithmic and therefore doesn't require a large mapping file, so it's appropriate for systems where storage comes at a premium. Yet they used a more complicated algorithm and didn't reuse an existing word list? It seems like their algorithm design was basically driven to try to make it hard to reverse engineer, and it didn't even achieve that. The only reason I can see why this became anything resembling a standard is that some people really want to pay for services. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1760 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1760

Nextgrid 7y ago
W3W is a nasty rent-seeking operation. They have invented a flawed solution looking for a problem and are using lots and lots of dubious PR to try and get it mainstream so they can then start charging for the use of their stupid algorithm. Their PR attempts are absolutely pathetic but sadly seem to work on the masses. Their most frequent angle is someone contacting emergency services but somehow can't figure out his location, and W3W comes along and magically saves the day. The problem is that if I need a phone app & GPS signal to figure out my W3W, why can't I just use the GPS coordinates directly?
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  While I agree that W3W is a nasty rent-seeking operation, I do think that in broad strokes the location-as-words concept could be useful. > The problem is that if I need a phone app & GPS signal to figure out my W3W, why can't I just use the GPS coordinates directly? Think about verbal/handwritten transmission and mental/handwritten storage. It's not easy to transcribe "41.022755, -73.913102" or remember it. "medium.axed.hobby" is much easier. Copy/paste doesn't always work well on phones, and doesn't work at all across devices.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    There are other open standards such as Plus Codes, but I actually disagree that (what it looks like to me) a hash-based system (which is more or less what W3W is) is better than a numeric system like GPS coordinates. 41, -73 (removed all decimals from your example location) still gives me the general location that it's somewhere in New York. My understanding is that removing a word from W3W completely invalidates it as it's like a hash. Incomplete GPS coordinates can be augmented by other information. W3W doesn't look like it can, if your phone cuts out before you said the last word of your W3W to the emergency dispatcher you're screwed. If your phone cuts out before you said the last few decimals of the GPS coordinates the dispatcher still has a chance of finding you.
    - mathw 7y ago
      The purpose of W3W not having nearby locations have similar words is because of transmission errors. They're pushing it in the UK at the moment having got several emergency services on board, and in that context if you say to, say, Norfolk Police call handlers that you're at bamboo cheese elephant and that shows up as somewhere in the middle of the Pacific they know they got a transmission error pretty much instantly and can ask for clarification. Although it'd be nice maybe to have soundalike tools in the search so it can say "hang on maybe they meant this place". Two conflicting needs really - as it stands, W3W is incredibly good for simple transmission by voice, but it's awful for giving you clues to geographic proximity.
      - kerkeslager 7y ago
- Lucadg 7y ago
  > Their PR attempts are absolutely pathetic but sadly seem to work on the masses. I guess you just described marketing. It's frustrating but if you want to sell to non-niche markets, you need to lower the standards to make it work.
thechao 7y ago
It always seemed to me that this should’ve been restricted to, say, 100 common words. That gives 1 million unique points, covering about 20 sq miles, each. If you want to be more precise, you could allow size, color, and texture adjectives on each word. 5 of each (including ‘no adjective’) would increase precision to about a 16x16 foot area. EDIT: to be clear: I think there should be 3 distinct lists of 100 words, so that the set is order free.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  A lot of good ideas here, but I'd shoot for a slightly larger number here than 100. You get a polynomial effect here, where a word added to list A gets you (the length of list B x the length of list C) more combinations--there's a lot of payoff to even adding just a few more words to each list. The surface area of the earth is about 200 million sq miles, so 1 million unique points gets you 200 sq miles each, not 20. That's 5,575,680,000,000,000 square feet. 40,000 words per list (the length of the W3W list) gets you down to about a 87 square foot (around 9ft x 9ft) area with three words. I tend to agree with you that 9ft x 9ft is smaller than necessary for most purposes. If we target a 16ft x 16ft area (5m x 5m for those using metric), we get that with three word lists of 28,000 words. Using six words (three nouns for general area, plus three adjectives for precision), word lists of 168 words are adequate. I'm not completely convinced that the larger areas are ever useful, however. By going to just 4 words, we can achieve the 16ft x 16ft area with four lists of 2200 words. Those lists are short enough to plausibly check for sound-alikes, enough words exist to have four separate word lists, and have a shorter resulting location phrase. I'm also not convinced that the set being order-free is really necessary. Transposition errors seem more likely in longer data sets than three words (hence even/odd word lists in the PGP word list).

Nextgrid 7y ago

W3W is a nasty rent-seeking operation. They have invented a flawed solution looking for a problem and are using lots and lots of dubious PR to try and get it mainstream so they can then start charging for the use of their stupid algorithm. Their PR attempts are absolutely pathetic but sadly seem to work on the masses. Their most frequent angle is someone contacting emergency services but somehow can't figure out his location, and W3W comes along and magically saves the day. The problem is that if I need a phone app & GPS signal to figure out my W3W, why can't I just use the GPS coordinates directly?

kerkeslager 7y ago
While I agree that W3W is a nasty rent-seeking operation, I do think that in broad strokes the location-as-words concept could be useful. > The problem is that if I need a phone app & GPS signal to figure out my W3W, why can't I just use the GPS coordinates directly? Think about verbal/handwritten transmission and mental/handwritten storage. It's not easy to transcribe "41.022755, -73.913102" or remember it. "medium.axed.hobby" is much easier. Copy/paste doesn't always work well on phones, and doesn't work at all across devices.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  There are other open standards such as Plus Codes, but I actually disagree that (what it looks like to me) a hash-based system (which is more or less what W3W is) is better than a numeric system like GPS coordinates. 41, -73 (removed all decimals from your example location) still gives me the general location that it's somewhere in New York. My understanding is that removing a word from W3W completely invalidates it as it's like a hash. Incomplete GPS coordinates can be augmented by other information. W3W doesn't look like it can, if your phone cuts out before you said the last word of your W3W to the emergency dispatcher you're screwed. If your phone cuts out before you said the last few decimals of the GPS coordinates the dispatcher still has a chance of finding you.
  - mathw 7y ago
    The purpose of W3W not having nearby locations have similar words is because of transmission errors. They're pushing it in the UK at the moment having got several emergency services on board, and in that context if you say to, say, Norfolk Police call handlers that you're at bamboo cheese elephant and that shows up as somewhere in the middle of the Pacific they know they got a transmission error pretty much instantly and can ask for clarification. Although it'd be nice maybe to have soundalike tools in the search so it can say "hang on maybe they meant this place". Two conflicting needs really - as it stands, W3W is incredibly good for simple transmission by voice, but it's awful for giving you clues to geographic proximity.
    - kerkeslager 7y ago
Lucadg 7y ago
> Their PR attempts are absolutely pathetic but sadly seem to work on the masses. I guess you just described marketing. It's frustrating but if you want to sell to non-niche markets, you need to lower the standards to make it work.

thechao 7y ago

It always seemed to me that this should’ve been restricted to, say, 100 common words. That gives 1 million unique points, covering about 20 sq miles, each. If you want to be more precise, you could allow size, color, and texture adjectives on each word. 5 of each (including ‘no adjective’) would increase precision to about a 16x16 foot area. EDIT: to be clear: I think there should be 3 distinct lists of 100 words, so that the set is order free.

kerkeslager 7y ago
A lot of good ideas here, but I'd shoot for a slightly larger number here than 100. You get a polynomial effect here, where a word added to list A gets you (the length of list B x the length of list C) more combinations--there's a lot of payoff to even adding just a few more words to each list. The surface area of the earth is about 200 million sq miles, so 1 million unique points gets you 200 sq miles each, not 20. That's 5,575,680,000,000,000 square feet. 40,000 words per list (the length of the W3W list) gets you down to about a 87 square foot (around 9ft x 9ft) area with three words. I tend to agree with you that 9ft x 9ft is smaller than necessary for most purposes. If we target a 16ft x 16ft area (5m x 5m for those using metric), we get that with three word lists of 28,000 words. Using six words (three nouns for general area, plus three adjectives for precision), word lists of 168 words are adequate. I'm not completely convinced that the larger areas are ever useful, however. By going to just 4 words, we can achieve the 16ft x 16ft area with four lists of 2200 words. Those lists are short enough to plausibly check for sound-alikes, enough words exist to have four separate word lists, and have a shorter resulting location phrase. I'm also not convinced that the set being order-free is really necessary. Transposition errors seem more likely in longer data sets than three words (hence even/odd word lists in the PGP word list).