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I don't think you could easily do that with 3 words. They already have a dictionary 40000 deep and then end up repeating words, just to get to get enough combin

I don't think you could easily do that with 3 words. They already have a dictionary 40000 deep and then end up repeating words, just to get to get enough combinations. With the GeohashPhrase we intentionally telescope exactly like you've described. This is because all we do is encode a geohash, and it already has this property.

tnjm 7y ago
GeohashPhrase looks quite brilliant. Will there be an open source implementation? I hope so -- it's hard to see it gaining traction against w3w without it, and it is undeniably better.
- thelittlenag 7y ago
  Yes! The geohashphrase will be free to use and open source. Right now we're working on an implementation and docs and once we have that we'll release all that under a permissive license. Right now the problem is that we don't have anything more than a description of our idea to release...
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    I don't mean to be snarky here, but what are you working on exactly? Geohashes are just base32, so can't you just decode that to bytes and then encode it as PGP word list? In Python, the base32 to bytes exists in the standard library, and with an import[2] you can get the code to convert bytes to PGP word list. Literally 2 lines of code. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list [2] https://github.com/thblt/pgp-words https://github.com/thblt/pgp-words
    - thelittlenag 7y ago
      The goal here is to be more clever than just encoding to a list of random words. We want to encode to a good choice of words. Partly, that means choosing words that are short, aurally clear, unambiguous, in common usage, etc. It also means we need words that together form a sentence. Initially that means choosing a good sentence structure. Our is [1-Adjective 2-Noun 3-Verb 4-Adjective 5-Noun (6-Adjective) (7-Noun)]. Next, we have to choose words that are most often the part of speech for the dictionary they need to live in, since we'll never re-use a word. Getting this dictionary together and having it good is a huge task. Of course we have a naive dictionary, but that's barely suitable for testing purposes. I may choose to make the "docs" I've written available today in their rough state. That will explain things slightly more.
      - kerkeslager 7y ago
        Okay, that makes more sense. PGP word list already did the "short, aurally clear, unambiguous, in common usage, etc." pretty well. But the way they're structured doesn't create sentences, and I can see how creating sentences would be helpful.
Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
the genius of w3w is that address phrases are really short and easy to read and remember and input into any kind of device, over voice or via text. And 40k dictionary never seemed a problem with w3w, cause it is easier to remember 3 words, even the ones which meaning you don't even know than to remember a 8-char long string filled with random characters. GeohashPhrase is an improvement, but still, the phrases in sample docs are just 3-4 words too long.
- thelittlenag 7y ago
  I think that w3w is over optimized and suffers from a large number of failure modes that interact poorly with a typical human's memory. For example, it is really easy to mis-remember and accidentally pluralize or re-order words. Our memories just don't maintain that kind of precision. Yet w3w will happily accept your mis-pluralized word, or re-ordered words, and spit out a location, with no indication that maybe you made a mistake. w3w forces you to remember and use exactly the 3 words they gave and nothing else, without risking a garbage-in-garbage-out scenario. In fairness, they do try to put similar words very far from each other, but unfortunately this only mitigates the risk and doesn't eliminate it. Our design is resilient to these issues in human memory with the geohashphrase. If you re-order words in the phrase, pluralize (or singularize) a word, or even go so far as to change part-of-speech (e.g. noun a verb) then you'll still get back the same geohash. Btw we hope to offer 4-base-word phrases for well populated locations. Those phrases should be easy enough to use in everday situations. Outside of that you can get complete coverage with a 5-base word phrase.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
    Well, w3w is far from perfect, sure. They have little to offer other than catchy branding and a ///very.nice.format btw, search.qalocate.com (as advertized in a video) does not work, and also has an incorrect certificate. Please fix, would be nice to toy with it.
    - thelittlenag 7y ago
      We're working on the implementation (as time permits). Once we have that it will be published and accessible from search.qalocate.com. The cert is "wrong" because I redirect back to qalocate.com and that cert only covers the base domain. We have another for all the sub domains but that isn't used by our main site. My hope is that we'll have something in the next few weeks but its only me (fulltime) and another guy (spare free time), so things move slowly. Btw, thank you so much for watching the video! I hope it was useful.

tnjm 7y ago

GeohashPhrase looks quite brilliant. Will there be an open source implementation? I hope so -- it's hard to see it gaining traction against w3w without it, and it is undeniably better.

thelittlenag 7y ago
Yes! The geohashphrase will be free to use and open source. Right now we're working on an implementation and docs and once we have that we'll release all that under a permissive license. Right now the problem is that we don't have anything more than a description of our idea to release...
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  I don't mean to be snarky here, but what are you working on exactly? Geohashes are just base32, so can't you just decode that to bytes and then encode it as PGP word list? In Python, the base32 to bytes exists in the standard library, and with an import[2] you can get the code to convert bytes to PGP word list. Literally 2 lines of code. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list [2] https://github.com/thblt/pgp-words https://github.com/thblt/pgp-words
  - thelittlenag 7y ago
    The goal here is to be more clever than just encoding to a list of random words. We want to encode to a good choice of words. Partly, that means choosing words that are short, aurally clear, unambiguous, in common usage, etc. It also means we need words that together form a sentence. Initially that means choosing a good sentence structure. Our is [1-Adjective 2-Noun 3-Verb 4-Adjective 5-Noun (6-Adjective) (7-Noun)]. Next, we have to choose words that are most often the part of speech for the dictionary they need to live in, since we'll never re-use a word. Getting this dictionary together and having it good is a huge task. Of course we have a naive dictionary, but that's barely suitable for testing purposes. I may choose to make the "docs" I've written available today in their rough state. That will explain things slightly more.
    - kerkeslager 7y ago
      Okay, that makes more sense. PGP word list already did the "short, aurally clear, unambiguous, in common usage, etc." pretty well. But the way they're structured doesn't create sentences, and I can see how creating sentences would be helpful.

Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago

the genius of w3w is that address phrases are really short and easy to read and remember and input into any kind of device, over voice or via text. And 40k dictionary never seemed a problem with w3w, cause it is easier to remember 3 words, even the ones which meaning you don't even know than to remember a 8-char long string filled with random characters. GeohashPhrase is an improvement, but still, the phrases in sample docs are just 3-4 words too long.

thelittlenag 7y ago
I think that w3w is over optimized and suffers from a large number of failure modes that interact poorly with a typical human's memory. For example, it is really easy to mis-remember and accidentally pluralize or re-order words. Our memories just don't maintain that kind of precision. Yet w3w will happily accept your mis-pluralized word, or re-ordered words, and spit out a location, with no indication that maybe you made a mistake. w3w forces you to remember and use exactly the 3 words they gave and nothing else, without risking a garbage-in-garbage-out scenario. In fairness, they do try to put similar words very far from each other, but unfortunately this only mitigates the risk and doesn't eliminate it. Our design is resilient to these issues in human memory with the geohashphrase. If you re-order words in the phrase, pluralize (or singularize) a word, or even go so far as to change part-of-speech (e.g. noun a verb) then you'll still get back the same geohash. Btw we hope to offer 4-base-word phrases for well populated locations. Those phrases should be easy enough to use in everday situations. Outside of that you can get complete coverage with a 5-base word phrase.
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  Well, w3w is far from perfect, sure. They have little to offer other than catchy branding and a ///very.nice.format btw, search.qalocate.com (as advertized in a video) does not work, and also has an incorrect certificate. Please fix, would be nice to toy with it.
  - thelittlenag 7y ago
    We're working on the implementation (as time permits). Once we have that it will be published and accessible from search.qalocate.com. The cert is "wrong" because I redirect back to qalocate.com and that cert only covers the base domain. We have another for all the sub domains but that isn't used by our main site. My hope is that we'll have something in the next few weeks but its only me (fulltime) and another guy (spare free time), so things move slowly. Btw, thank you so much for watching the video! I hope it was useful.