4 ms·
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 sever
by 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 agoI have to say, I don't think W3W is actually that great for simple transmission by voice. It doesn't seem like they've put in any effort at all to avoid similar-sounding words. I did a few searches on the word list and found a bunch of groups with very little effort: * pace, placed, plates, pays * blush, plush, brushed, brushes * crave, craved, chafe, safe * inks, mink, pink, pinks, kinks, link, wink, winks, think, thinks, blink, brink, blinks, clinks, slinks, rinks, drinks * yappy, happy, nappy, snappy, sappy, strappy, scrappy I kind of just stopped searching for each of these groups, I'm sure there's more for each one. If I can find sound-alikes this easily, just by probability there are going to be similar-sounding adjacent locations. I'm also not convinced that geographic proximity versus transmission accuracy is a tradeoff we need to make. One very simple solution would be to add an error-checking word, which is essentially a fast-hash of the first three words. I'm not convinced given what we know about memory with regard to numbers, that three words is somehow the ideal number--storing four words in short- or long-term is not noticeably harder to me.
- kerkeslager 7y agoI wrote a short Python script which cross-references the W3W word list with a homophones list[1], and found this: census,senses choral,coral clairvoyance,clairvoyants collard,collared confectionary,confectionery disburse,disperse epic,epoch equivalence,equivalents hurdle,hurtle incidence,incidents incite,insight incompetence,incompetents independence,independents innocence,innocents instance,instants intense,intents lightening,lightning ordinance,ordnance overdo,overdue parse,pass pokey,poky precedence,precedents,presidents purest,purist recede,reseed sari,sorry senses,census variance,variants verses,versus Those aren't sound-alikes, they're straight-up homophones. If we cross-referenced against a list which contained sound-alikes, I'm sure we'd end up with a much larger list of collisions. EDIT: This is the script: with open('word_data.txt') as f: words = set(l.strip() for l in f.readlines()) with open('homophones.txt') as f: for l in f.readlines(): l = l.strip() homophone_group = (h.strip('*') for h in l.split()) filtered_homophone_group = tuple(h for h in homophone_group if h in words) if len(filtered_homophone_group) > 1: print(','.join(filtered_homophone_group)) The `strip('*')` bit is needed because my copy/paste into homophones.txt pulled in some asterices(sp?) and I didn't want to go through and fix them manually. [1] http://homophonelist.com/homophones-list/ http://homophonelist.com/homophones-list/