4 ms·
Interesting. I can see how the basic algorithm might go "I've been asked for the time (or temp or whatever) in cityname. Citynames are routinely reused globally
by ubermonkey 6y ago
Interesting. I can see how the basic algorithm might go "I've been asked for the time (or temp or whatever) in cityname. Citynames are routinely reused globally; what is the closest such cityname?"
But that fails completely when you get to names like London (or Paris or Moscow or Cairo).
But it happens with people, too. I'm from Mississippi, though I haven't lived there since I left for college. I now live in Houston. At a family reunion many years ago, I ran into a cousin I hadn't seen since we were kids. She asked where I was living, and I told her.
"Oh, isn't it terrible about that wreck?" she asked.
Baffled, I asked for more information. "Oh, you know, that wreck over on 406!"
I did not know. "I'm sorry, Houston's really huge. I don't know what wreck you mean."
"Oh, did you mean you live in Houston, TEXAS? I thought you meant Houston, MISSISSIPPI!"
I was, at the time, about 30. I grew up in that state, and lived there until I went to college. And until that moment, I had never even HEARD of Houston, Mississippi (a metropolis, it turns out, of about 3600 people in the misbegotten northeast corner of the state).
- gmac 6y agoIt just feels like what is the closest such city name is pretty obviously an insufficient test. To approximate what a human would do, one would presumably want to start by ranking places on a range of dimensions: * nearest * biggest (or maybe size category: big city, city, town, village) * how many times user has asked about this place before * how recently user last asked about this place * ... If most/all these rankings put the same place in the top spot, go for it! Otherwise, ask the user for clarification.
- netsharc 6y agoI wonder if there are Chinese cities with names close to major world cities. Paris has 2.15m people, its metropolitan area has 12.x million. A medium sized city im China has more than that. If by coincidence it's also named Paris, getting that as the search result would be annoying.
- ubermonkey 6y agoOh, I absolutely agree. But I can see how that might have come in as a first-assumption that was never revised. Which, if you think about it, is probably a huge class of bugs industry-wide.