7 ms·

Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies

91 points by kevinbowman 5y ago

ggm 5y ago
analogous to hash collision? what4words would reduce it. But you can't stop english language pluralisms (for instance) and if you start to make all plurals synonymous, you reduce the wordcount massively.
- parhamn 5y ago
  According to wolframalpha (Log2(surface area of earth / 9m^2)) about 46 bits of information.
  - vincnetas 5y ago
    So basically using A-Z 0-9 you could have it geocoded using 3 x3 signs (for example 2J4.KI9.999)
    - ignoramous 5y ago
      One can be more cute and come up with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code
- adamjb 5y ago
  You only need a lexicon of about 700 words to get a resolution of 50m with four words, which I reckon would be good enough for rescue work (i.e. the one niche w3w has managed to establish itself in).
parhamn 5y ago
What are the scenarios where you know the 3 words but not the lat-long?
- vincnetas 5y ago
  And its proprietary coding scheme :( At least wiki brightened my mood : The site has been parodied by others who have created services including What3Emojis[29] using emojis, What3Birds[30] using British birds, What3fucks[31] using swear words and What3Numbers[32] using OpenStreetMap tile identifiers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words
- cbo100 5y ago
  None. Any app that can lookup your words can show you the coords. The only justification is the ease of communication over the phone. I only don't like that it's proprietary and the company responsible is pretty aggressive about enforcing their rights - there shouldn't be a place for that in public emergency services.
  - akira2501 5y ago
    > The only justification is the ease of communication over the phone. I mean.. as opposed to two numbers? A slow speed high error correction audio encoding of them would be easy. Call emergency services, press the button, they decode the tones, immediate, accurate, simple. If you mixed the calling and playback into a single action, you could make calls and direct people without even the ability to speak.
    - cbo100 5y ago
      Well yeah, I'm not convinced either, but I also don't deal with panic ridden callers to emergency phone lines. I think I've called emergency 3 times in my many years. Maybe it helps with an issue they have noticed with certain callers that I'm not aware of.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- sellyme 5y ago
  There's two scenarios here. Either you're looking up an exact location (either w3w or ll) as the information is required and then communicating it to others, or you're doing that in advance for an area you're familiar with and then memorising it. In situation A, it's going to be a lot quicker and clearer to communicate w3w than an ll pair (for the same precision a ll pair requires 12-18 digits, plus specificity on +/-). In situation B it's going to be a lot easier to remember the w3w descriptor, and you still have the same advantage as in situation A. For spoken communication, w3w's rival is "it's 123 Fake Street, I'm the bloke in the green parka", not ll pairs.
irjustin 5y ago
I don't envy the team. It's a great idea but falls short once it leaves the lab. Everything gets really dirty in the real world especially during high stress or emergencies. Moving to four words could really help remove the need for plural and words that sound similar. Accents really do make things tough.
- sen 5y ago
  Yeah the general idea is OK, but the practical usage just doesn't pan out unless you remove all plurals, all words that sound similar (including if spoken with different accents), etc etc. Then you end up needing 4-5 words, most with multiple syllables, and you're back to it being just as easy to tell the lat/long or using some other system.
- sneak 5y ago
  You should envy the team. They've raised tens of millions of dollars for licensing of an algorithm that people RE'd in a day. Their business now involves lots of bizdev droids and threatening open source implementors with baseless copyright lawsuits. It's nice work if you can get it.
- mdoms 5y ago
  It's not a great idea it's a stupid idea.
- g_p 5y ago
  I am surprised they've never tried to introduce some kind of erasure coding or error correction coding. A 4th word from a finite set could act as a "check word" that would detect wrong order of words, mis-spellings of words etc. I also feel like the solution W3W is trying to deliver is a short term patch until we get emergency SMS location from phones themselves delivered to the control room - having in band spoken location works until you have that, but W3W leaves a lot to be desired. Given it is an app, it might be easier for it to show the user words to read, which are themselves all just NATO phonetic alphabet words to spell their location. You'll get far more redundancy and human error correction over the voice channel using the phonetic alphabet than words. It wouldn't be as shiny a solution though, and that probably doesn't play into W3W's marketing strategy... Even if it would help save more lives.
notafraudster 5y ago
It's a little weird the algorithm doesn't ensure minimum edit + soundex distance between all cell pairs.
- LorenPechtel 5y ago
  They optimized for doing it with three words, they obviously didn't even consider how it would fare against errors.
sneak 5y ago
W3W is a proprietary algorithm that has threatened people who published analyses of their algorithm. They got whatfreewords.org censored for publishing an independent open implementation. It's also not well designed, as plurals and homophones are not accounted for. Avoid using or promoting this system.
- jonatron 5y ago
  The problem with the site you mentioned is that it was a clear cut case of copyright, trademark, and patent infringement all in one. I think the creator remained anonymous because they knew this. I agree that it's not well designed and shouldn't be used.
  - sneak 5y ago
    What copyrighted work was it infringing upon?
    - jonatron 5y ago
      The word list
      - sneak 5y ago
        In the UK, my understanding is that "skill, labour, and judgment" have to be involved in the compilation of a list for it to be eligible for copyright. TFA seems to suggest that this isn't such a list.
        jonatron 5y ago
        Someone must have put time (labour) into making the list. There's law specific to database copyright in the UK https://www.cooleygo.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-uk-database-rights/amp/ https://www.cooleygo.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-uk-data...
        jillesvangurp 5y ago
yitchelle 5y ago
This W3W system relies on the correct English spelling of 3 words, in the correct sequence to identify the location. Can't help but feel that this is a bad idea. From writing code, we know that the more code you use, the higher the chance of bug entering the code. Also felt that the authorities are trying to extend the UK postcode system to the rest of the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdo...
tlrobinson 5y ago
At a minimum the scheme should include a checksum.
blkhawk 5y ago
I wonder if a more efficient system for this kind of use-case would be possible by giving up on "global" positioning. by relying on context you can lower the area you need to have address combinations for. In practice you would simply repeat the addresses every couple of 1000km or so. needing help and calling in rescue from the other side of the world while also being unable to say you are in such and such area is presumably not something that happens too often.
- g_p 5y ago
  In addition, the user knows their own location by virtue of having access to a GPS device - for W3W to work they've used a GPS and it's really just an in-band voice protocol for exchange of location. It strikes me that W3W will eventually be replaced by the emergency location standards built into mobile which effectively SMS your location to the control centre on starting the call. Then there's little need for voice based W3W exchange - at best it could be a dialogue between caller and call handler to confirm the approximate area and location, and to take details like (for urban environments) if it's an apartment block or house etc. Or off the beaten track, which side of the mountain route they walked up to reach their current location.
  - blkhawk 5y ago
    maybe some type of encoding that sends it via audio. Would probably be the most robust way plus you can use the same encoding everywhere no matter the communication medium or cell net support.
  - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    The few times I've accidentally called emergency services, my Android phone asks me first if I want to allow the phone app to access my location... It would've been more logical to automatically share it, to be honest...
cseleborg 5y ago
The article seems wrong about some of these locations: > duties.factory.person was located in China I get Switzerland [1] > refuse.housework.housebound was in Australia I get Belarus [2] > demand.heave.surprise was actually in Canada I get China [3] Now that's really confusing. Is that a bug in the system that changes the locations of three-word-codes, or is that (very) poor reporting? [1] https://what3words.com/duties.factory.person https://what3words.com/duties.factory.person [2] https://what3words.com/refuse.housework.housebound https://what3words.com/refuse.housework.housebound [3] https://what3words.com/demand.heave.surprise https://what3words.com/demand.heave.surprise
- cseleborg 5y ago
  On the same token, further down the article says: > So, for example, circle.goal.leader and circle.goal.leaders are less than 1.2 miles (2km) apart along the River Thames. The second one is in South Dakota for me: https://what3words.com/circle.goal.leaders https://what3words.com/circle.goal.leaders
  - ctz 5y ago
    It's circle.goals.leader, which really underlines the point.
    - simonjgreen 5y ago
      Yes, this really demonstrates how this system doesn't live up to its promise. As someone previously involved in a SAR team I find the growing expectations on W3W very frustrating. It's like watching a slow train wreck. Ambulance and police services here are rolling it out in a kind of shadow-IT form way too rapidly. The largest problem I have with it by far though is pegging all these organisations to a reliance on a tech startup and a closed license.
- cbo100 5y ago
  Is it possible the reporters were using a different localisation of w3w, and translated the words before giving them to the rescuers? Edit: scratch that - it doesn't really lead to this problem does it.
sandGorgon 5y ago
Google "Plus Codes" are being used in India - especially in underserved communities like slums. https://www.addressingtheunaddressed.org/ https://www.addressingtheunaddressed.org/ . If you want to use this tech + operations expertise in other geographies...just reach out to them. They intend to share their knowhow and expertise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd3gGspgVGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd3gGspgVGs Also from what i understand, after the success in Kolkata, this was then used in Native American communities. P.S. Plus Codes are open source - https://github.com/google/open-location-code https://github.com/google/open-location-code And they are well researched. >The character set for Open Location Code was selected out of over eight billion possibilities, using a word list of 10,000 words from 30 languages. All possible sets were scored on whether they could spell the test words, and the most promising sets evaluated by hand. >Plus codes can be encoded and decoded offline. >Plus codes do not depend on any infrastructure, and so are not dependent on any organisation or company for their continued existence or usage.
- petepete 5y ago
  For a moment I thought you meant Google+ had some kind of location system that'd found a niche use! Thanks for the link though, hadn't heard of plus codes.
- neolog 5y ago
  > An Evaluation of Location Encoding Systems https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation-of-Location-Encoding-Systems https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation...
  - sandGorgon 5y ago
    >Making a mistake with a code may simply display somewhere else - for example, on What3Words, "banana rabbit monkey" is a location in Argentina, "banana monkey rabbit" is in Russia.
    - onion2k 5y ago
      That's a problem if you don't know anything more than the three words, but it's quite useful if you do. For example, if you know someone is travelling in South America then the huge difference means one is obviously wrong. It would be more problematic if the two locations were similar. Making it clear when something is incorrect for a given context is quite a helpful feature. But you need to have the necessary context.
v4rp1ng 5y ago
They forgot to mention how many times it helped to find people in need. its easy to say 45 times there was an error - imagine how many times emergency services around the world get sent to the wrong or unaccurate location...
- tomcooks 5y ago
  That's not how emergency comm is supposed to work
hatsunearu 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System this is widely in use in the ham radio circle and it works great--if you know phonetic alphabets, it's easily understood over the air, truncation is well-behaved, and so on and so forth. edit: for SAR you probably need 8 characters not the customary 4/6 character version
aaron695 5y ago
> jump.legend.warblers which was in Vietnam So they knew exactly that it was wrong. So it worked perfectly. If you want to be hip you could write a program to work out what was actually said given other information, ie what cell tower it came from. I hate 3 words, I can't remember why, maybe it was copyright or something, but this article isn't selling why it's a problem. Rescuers will also get all the normal info like the parents who might know the track, and everything else said. Saying just use latitude and longitude co-ordinates, is like saying "MREW is keen to encourage anyone planning a day in the outdoors to carry a paper map and a compass" Latitude and longitude is scary and complex. Rescuers might think it's easy but I'm sure there's plenty of things they find scary and hard other people find easy. Just the appearance of most of the latitude and longitude apps is technical. 'What 3 Words' sounds like teddy bears.
- tomcooks 5y ago
  Lat and long are scary? It's 2 numbers eh. Lat/Lon is already integrated in all mapping apps or GPS devices. You can easily make a lat/lon visualizer with simple html and JavaScript; it would require GPS and a web connection, but so does this stupid what3words.
- Kwpolska 5y ago
  >> jump.legend.warblers which was in Vietnam > So they knew exactly that it was wrong. So it worked perfectly. Okay, but what if they got the invalid location and then the caller disconnected? Calling them back might be difficult. And if you do get the caller to repeat, can you now be sure that "jump.legends.warbler", which is in the UK, wasn't supposed to be "jump.legends.warblers", which is also in the UK? And how many cases are there that they didn’t mention, which were in the correct country, but a few kilometers off the real location?
tomcooks 5y ago
Terrible: based on a single language, proprietary, IP owners being assholes, creates problems to the user case it was supposedly designed for, doesn't feature distance computing algorithms, takes even more space in a DB cell than latlong, I can go on for days. Use numbers.
- moooo99 5y ago
  There are really are issues with such a system and you listed some of them, but your recommendation makes me feel like you didn't read beyond the headline. They need a way to transfer location data by the word of mouth, which is extremely difficult when you're using numbers. With longer numbers, such as a comparatively precise location, you have a high risk of errors on both ends, so searching for a solution makes absolute sense. Nevertheless, based on the proprietary IP maybe the rescue services should consider building an own solution or evaluating open source alternatives if there are any
  - another-dave 5y ago
    Though What 3 Words requires you to download a custom app & for the emergency services to use a back-end for the same app when handling incoming calls — if we're doing that, could we not just have a simple app that checks your GPS and then dials 999 with your lat/lng added to the phone number? My bank get me to key in my sort code & account number while using telephone banking. If we did the same here, we could get the precision of GPS without the user needing to call out any numbers
    - tomcooks 5y ago
      Bonus points: all modern browsers understand coordinate based location, no need to add an app.
    - teruakohatu 5y ago
      In New Zealand if you call the emergency number 111, the operator can automatically request the location of the device from the telco (with no opt out) if they belive there is a serious emergency and the location is not communicated. There is also some standardised way for the mobile phone to automatically send GPS coordinates to emergency numbers.
mcintyre1994 5y ago
The examples given here seem like the best case of it going wrong, they’re in a different country and UK rescuers know within seconds that they’re wrong. I think this case further down is much more concerning: > He found that the algorithm behind W3W often gave similar-sounding words and plural versions of words for locations in close proximity, which could cause confusion. > So, for example, circle.goal.leader and circle.goal.leaders are less than 1.2 miles (2km) apart along the River Thames. I wonder if the algorithm could somehow make it so similar sounding words like this aren’t anywhere near each other physically. It’s not as big a problem that leader and leaders sound the same, if you guarantee that only one of them is in the UK or at least within the same city/national park etc.
- gambiting 5y ago
  It's literally in the article: "So, for example, circle.goal.leader and circle.goal.leaders are less than 1.2 miles (2km) apart along the River Thames." That's potentially catastrophic, without an easy way to spot the mistake.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    That's the exact example used in the comment you're replying to...?
    - gambiting 5y ago
      Unless I was asleep replying(there is a 5% chance of that), I'm pretty sure their comment didn't say that at the time.
- stouset 5y ago
  Such an example is presented in the article.
gfaure 5y ago
Here’s the result of @cybergibbons’ reverse engineering into the distribution over w3w terms that only differ in singular vs. plural: https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-suitable-for-safety-critical-applications/ https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su...
noplzno 5y ago
Morse code and other maybe newer concise encodings are inevitable.
mdoms 5y ago
What? Why not just give a fucking location? What the hell is this?
- jokoon 5y ago
  The goal is to share a precise enough location without copy pasting, so with spellable and memorable words.
m12k 5y ago
Sounds like they need to prune the word list and/or group together possible mispronunciations, misspellings and misreadings. If "correct horse battery" is a location, then "correct hose battery" and "correct house battery" need to be synonyms of the same location, not alternate locations. Either that or remove horse, hose and house from the word list entirely.
- VBprogrammer 5y ago
  Shouldn't those things be as far apart as possible? Then the conversation would be Person: "emm, I'm lost on the Yorkshire Moors...". Rescuer: "no problem sir, just take advantage of the completely flawless wireless telephony system we have to download this app..." Person: "ok, it says I'm at correct house battery" Rescuer: "hmm, I'm showing you at the top of a mountain in Nepal. Let's try that again..."
  - m12k 5y ago
    I think if this is to be used by emergency services, then the time it takes to go "Let's try that again..." could mean the difference between life and death. I'd rather the system were designed in a way not just to make human error detectable, but rather make it not an error in the first place. (and I assume you're joking about asking someone to download an app they don't already have while on a call with emergency services, that can obviously never be the best solution)
  - LorenPechtel 5y ago
    It would be safe enough if the ones that are close are *guaranteed* to be exceedingly far apart and the lookup algorithm allowed specifying an area. If correct horse battery is in England and correct house battery is in China and you have a well designed lookup it would know you're looking for something in England. correct house battery is in China at x, y. Do you mean correct horse battery in England at z, w? The real danger comes when the mistakes are a few miles apart.
noplzno 5y ago
once we escape our ubiquitious communication problem we will have no issues understanding one another
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mro_name 5y ago
I have to mention Geohash because it's easy to spell, licence free, variable precision, what else? Plug: https://demo.mro.name/geohash.cgi https://demo.mro.name/geohash.cgi That said, having familiar words in your (local?) alphabet is charming. But for public good it HAS to be public domain (the alphabet + algo, not the service, however).
dang 5y ago
Recent and related: Why What3Words is not suitable for safety critical applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058271 - May 2021 (35 comments) Why What3Words is not suitable for safety critical applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27029706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27029706 - May 2021 (3 comments) What3Words: App used by emergency services under scrutiny - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26985759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26985759 - April 2021 (14 comments)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jokoon 5y ago
I always thought that a combination of a geohash-like z order curve over a 15km radius, with an offline gps coordinates list of the 5000 most populated cities on earth would be sufficient to cover 99% of people on earth. Not sure what's the average number of characters required for a 20m to 100m precision with such method. It's true that the idea of plus codes of using city names makes a lot of sense.
- mro_name 5y ago
  I once heard a really unique orientation talk about http://www.volksnav.com http://www.volksnav.com – based on the idea of polar coordinates like on an imagined clock dial flat on earth centered at your local reference point (e.g. city center) and 12 o'clock = south. Used in one city in Brazil, I think.
mikewarot 5y ago
One of my favorite atomic tourism sites is near charm files rush (Red Gate Woods, outside Chicago, home to the remains of Chicago Piles 2 and 3), or is it charm file rush (Which is in Brazil), or is it charms file rush, on the border between New Hampshire and Maine? Not a good system.

91 points by kevinbowman 5y ago

ggm 5y ago

analogous to hash collision? what4words would reduce it. But you can't stop english language pluralisms (for instance) and if you start to make all plurals synonymous, you reduce the wordcount massively.

parhamn 5y ago
According to wolframalpha (Log2(surface area of earth / 9m^2)) about 46 bits of information.
- vincnetas 5y ago
  So basically using A-Z 0-9 you could have it geocoded using 3 x3 signs (for example 2J4.KI9.999)
  - ignoramous 5y ago
    One can be more cute and come up with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code
adamjb 5y ago
You only need a lexicon of about 700 words to get a resolution of 50m with four words, which I reckon would be good enough for rescue work (i.e. the one niche w3w has managed to establish itself in).

parhamn 5y ago

What are the scenarios where you know the 3 words but not the lat-long?

vincnetas 5y ago
And its proprietary coding scheme :( At least wiki brightened my mood : The site has been parodied by others who have created services including What3Emojis[29] using emojis, What3Birds[30] using British birds, What3fucks[31] using swear words and What3Numbers[32] using OpenStreetMap tile identifiers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words
cbo100 5y ago
None. Any app that can lookup your words can show you the coords. The only justification is the ease of communication over the phone. I only don't like that it's proprietary and the company responsible is pretty aggressive about enforcing their rights - there shouldn't be a place for that in public emergency services.
- akira2501 5y ago
  > The only justification is the ease of communication over the phone. I mean.. as opposed to two numbers? A slow speed high error correction audio encoding of them would be easy. Call emergency services, press the button, they decode the tones, immediate, accurate, simple. If you mixed the calling and playback into a single action, you could make calls and direct people without even the ability to speak.
  - cbo100 5y ago
    Well yeah, I'm not convinced either, but I also don't deal with panic ridden callers to emergency phone lines. I think I've called emergency 3 times in my many years. Maybe it helps with an issue they have noticed with certain callers that I'm not aware of.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
sellyme 5y ago
There's two scenarios here. Either you're looking up an exact location (either w3w or ll) as the information is required and then communicating it to others, or you're doing that in advance for an area you're familiar with and then memorising it. In situation A, it's going to be a lot quicker and clearer to communicate w3w than an ll pair (for the same precision a ll pair requires 12-18 digits, plus specificity on +/-). In situation B it's going to be a lot easier to remember the w3w descriptor, and you still have the same advantage as in situation A. For spoken communication, w3w's rival is "it's 123 Fake Street, I'm the bloke in the green parka", not ll pairs.

irjustin 5y ago

I don't envy the team. It's a great idea but falls short once it leaves the lab. Everything gets really dirty in the real world especially during high stress or emergencies. Moving to four words could really help remove the need for plural and words that sound similar. Accents really do make things tough.

sen 5y ago
Yeah the general idea is OK, but the practical usage just doesn't pan out unless you remove all plurals, all words that sound similar (including if spoken with different accents), etc etc. Then you end up needing 4-5 words, most with multiple syllables, and you're back to it being just as easy to tell the lat/long or using some other system.
sneak 5y ago
You should envy the team. They've raised tens of millions of dollars for licensing of an algorithm that people RE'd in a day. Their business now involves lots of bizdev droids and threatening open source implementors with baseless copyright lawsuits. It's nice work if you can get it.
mdoms 5y ago
It's not a great idea it's a stupid idea.
g_p 5y ago
I am surprised they've never tried to introduce some kind of erasure coding or error correction coding. A 4th word from a finite set could act as a "check word" that would detect wrong order of words, mis-spellings of words etc. I also feel like the solution W3W is trying to deliver is a short term patch until we get emergency SMS location from phones themselves delivered to the control room - having in band spoken location works until you have that, but W3W leaves a lot to be desired. Given it is an app, it might be easier for it to show the user words to read, which are themselves all just NATO phonetic alphabet words to spell their location. You'll get far more redundancy and human error correction over the voice channel using the phonetic alphabet than words. It wouldn't be as shiny a solution though, and that probably doesn't play into W3W's marketing strategy... Even if it would help save more lives.

notafraudster 5y ago

It's a little weird the algorithm doesn't ensure minimum edit + soundex distance between all cell pairs.

LorenPechtel 5y ago
They optimized for doing it with three words, they obviously didn't even consider how it would fare against errors.

sneak 5y ago

W3W is a proprietary algorithm that has threatened people who published analyses of their algorithm. They got whatfreewords.org censored for publishing an independent open implementation. It's also not well designed, as plurals and homophones are not accounted for. Avoid using or promoting this system.

jonatron 5y ago
The problem with the site you mentioned is that it was a clear cut case of copyright, trademark, and patent infringement all in one. I think the creator remained anonymous because they knew this. I agree that it's not well designed and shouldn't be used.
- sneak 5y ago
  What copyrighted work was it infringing upon?
  - jonatron 5y ago
    The word list
    - sneak 5y ago
      In the UK, my understanding is that "skill, labour, and judgment" have to be involved in the compilation of a list for it to be eligible for copyright. TFA seems to suggest that this isn't such a list.
      - jonatron 5y ago
        Someone must have put time (labour) into making the list. There's law specific to database copyright in the UK https://www.cooleygo.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-uk-database-rights/amp/ https://www.cooleygo.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-uk-data...
      - jillesvangurp 5y ago

yitchelle 5y ago

This W3W system relies on the correct English spelling of 3 words, in the correct sequence to identify the location. Can't help but feel that this is a bad idea. From writing code, we know that the more code you use, the higher the chance of bug entering the code. Also felt that the authorities are trying to extend the UK postcode system to the rest of the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdo...

tlrobinson 5y ago

At a minimum the scheme should include a checksum.

blkhawk 5y ago

I wonder if a more efficient system for this kind of use-case would be possible by giving up on "global" positioning. by relying on context you can lower the area you need to have address combinations for. In practice you would simply repeat the addresses every couple of 1000km or so. needing help and calling in rescue from the other side of the world while also being unable to say you are in such and such area is presumably not something that happens too often.

g_p 5y ago
In addition, the user knows their own location by virtue of having access to a GPS device - for W3W to work they've used a GPS and it's really just an in-band voice protocol for exchange of location. It strikes me that W3W will eventually be replaced by the emergency location standards built into mobile which effectively SMS your location to the control centre on starting the call. Then there's little need for voice based W3W exchange - at best it could be a dialogue between caller and call handler to confirm the approximate area and location, and to take details like (for urban environments) if it's an apartment block or house etc. Or off the beaten track, which side of the mountain route they walked up to reach their current location.
- blkhawk 5y ago
  maybe some type of encoding that sends it via audio. Would probably be the most robust way plus you can use the same encoding everywhere no matter the communication medium or cell net support.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  The few times I've accidentally called emergency services, my Android phone asks me first if I want to allow the phone app to access my location... It would've been more logical to automatically share it, to be honest...

cseleborg 5y ago

The article seems wrong about some of these locations: > duties.factory.person was located in China I get Switzerland [1] > refuse.housework.housebound was in Australia I get Belarus [2] > demand.heave.surprise was actually in Canada I get China [3] Now that's really confusing. Is that a bug in the system that changes the locations of three-word-codes, or is that (very) poor reporting? [1] https://what3words.com/duties.factory.person https://what3words.com/duties.factory.person [2] https://what3words.com/refuse.housework.housebound https://what3words.com/refuse.housework.housebound [3] https://what3words.com/demand.heave.surprise https://what3words.com/demand.heave.surprise

cseleborg 5y ago
On the same token, further down the article says: > So, for example, circle.goal.leader and circle.goal.leaders are less than 1.2 miles (2km) apart along the River Thames. The second one is in South Dakota for me: https://what3words.com/circle.goal.leaders https://what3words.com/circle.goal.leaders
- ctz 5y ago
  It's circle.goals.leader, which really underlines the point.
  - simonjgreen 5y ago
    Yes, this really demonstrates how this system doesn't live up to its promise. As someone previously involved in a SAR team I find the growing expectations on W3W very frustrating. It's like watching a slow train wreck. Ambulance and police services here are rolling it out in a kind of shadow-IT form way too rapidly. The largest problem I have with it by far though is pegging all these organisations to a reliance on a tech startup and a closed license.
cbo100 5y ago
Is it possible the reporters were using a different localisation of w3w, and translated the words before giving them to the rescuers? Edit: scratch that - it doesn't really lead to this problem does it.

sandGorgon 5y ago

Google "Plus Codes" are being used in India - especially in underserved communities like slums. https://www.addressingtheunaddressed.org/ https://www.addressingtheunaddressed.org/ . If you want to use this tech + operations expertise in other geographies...just reach out to them. They intend to share their knowhow and expertise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd3gGspgVGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd3gGspgVGs Also from what i understand, after the success in Kolkata, this was then used in Native American communities. P.S. Plus Codes are open source - https://github.com/google/open-location-code https://github.com/google/open-location-code And they are well researched. >The character set for Open Location Code was selected out of over eight billion possibilities, using a word list of 10,000 words from 30 languages. All possible sets were scored on whether they could spell the test words, and the most promising sets evaluated by hand. >Plus codes can be encoded and decoded offline. >Plus codes do not depend on any infrastructure, and so are not dependent on any organisation or company for their continued existence or usage.

petepete 5y ago
For a moment I thought you meant Google+ had some kind of location system that'd found a niche use! Thanks for the link though, hadn't heard of plus codes.
neolog 5y ago
> An Evaluation of Location Encoding Systems https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation-of-Location-Encoding-Systems https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation...
- sandGorgon 5y ago
  >Making a mistake with a code may simply display somewhere else - for example, on What3Words, "banana rabbit monkey" is a location in Argentina, "banana monkey rabbit" is in Russia.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    That's a problem if you don't know anything more than the three words, but it's quite useful if you do. For example, if you know someone is travelling in South America then the huge difference means one is obviously wrong. It would be more problematic if the two locations were similar. Making it clear when something is incorrect for a given context is quite a helpful feature. But you need to have the necessary context.

v4rp1ng 5y ago

They forgot to mention how many times it helped to find people in need. its easy to say 45 times there was an error - imagine how many times emergency services around the world get sent to the wrong or unaccurate location...

tomcooks 5y ago
That's not how emergency comm is supposed to work

hatsunearu 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System this is widely in use in the ham radio circle and it works great--if you know phonetic alphabets, it's easily understood over the air, truncation is well-behaved, and so on and so forth. edit: for SAR you probably need 8 characters not the customary 4/6 character version

aaron695 5y ago

> jump.legend.warblers which was in Vietnam So they knew exactly that it was wrong. So it worked perfectly. If you want to be hip you could write a program to work out what was actually said given other information, ie what cell tower it came from. I hate 3 words, I can't remember why, maybe it was copyright or something, but this article isn't selling why it's a problem. Rescuers will also get all the normal info like the parents who might know the track, and everything else said. Saying just use latitude and longitude co-ordinates, is like saying "MREW is keen to encourage anyone planning a day in the outdoors to carry a paper map and a compass" Latitude and longitude is scary and complex. Rescuers might think it's easy but I'm sure there's plenty of things they find scary and hard other people find easy. Just the appearance of most of the latitude and longitude apps is technical. 'What 3 Words' sounds like teddy bears.

tomcooks 5y ago
Lat and long are scary? It's 2 numbers eh. Lat/Lon is already integrated in all mapping apps or GPS devices. You can easily make a lat/lon visualizer with simple html and JavaScript; it would require GPS and a web connection, but so does this stupid what3words.
Kwpolska 5y ago
>> jump.legend.warblers which was in Vietnam > So they knew exactly that it was wrong. So it worked perfectly. Okay, but what if they got the invalid location and then the caller disconnected? Calling them back might be difficult. And if you do get the caller to repeat, can you now be sure that "jump.legends.warbler", which is in the UK, wasn't supposed to be "jump.legends.warblers", which is also in the UK? And how many cases are there that they didn’t mention, which were in the correct country, but a few kilometers off the real location?

tomcooks 5y ago

Terrible: based on a single language, proprietary, IP owners being assholes, creates problems to the user case it was supposedly designed for, doesn't feature distance computing algorithms, takes even more space in a DB cell than latlong, I can go on for days. Use numbers.

moooo99 5y ago
There are really are issues with such a system and you listed some of them, but your recommendation makes me feel like you didn't read beyond the headline. They need a way to transfer location data by the word of mouth, which is extremely difficult when you're using numbers. With longer numbers, such as a comparatively precise location, you have a high risk of errors on both ends, so searching for a solution makes absolute sense. Nevertheless, based on the proprietary IP maybe the rescue services should consider building an own solution or evaluating open source alternatives if there are any
- another-dave 5y ago
  Though What 3 Words requires you to download a custom app & for the emergency services to use a back-end for the same app when handling incoming calls — if we're doing that, could we not just have a simple app that checks your GPS and then dials 999 with your lat/lng added to the phone number? My bank get me to key in my sort code & account number while using telephone banking. If we did the same here, we could get the precision of GPS without the user needing to call out any numbers
  - tomcooks 5y ago
    Bonus points: all modern browsers understand coordinate based location, no need to add an app.
  - teruakohatu 5y ago
    In New Zealand if you call the emergency number 111, the operator can automatically request the location of the device from the telco (with no opt out) if they belive there is a serious emergency and the location is not communicated. There is also some standardised way for the mobile phone to automatically send GPS coordinates to emergency numbers.

mcintyre1994 5y ago

The examples given here seem like the best case of it going wrong, they’re in a different country and UK rescuers know within seconds that they’re wrong. I think this case further down is much more concerning: > He found that the algorithm behind W3W often gave similar-sounding words and plural versions of words for locations in close proximity, which could cause confusion. > So, for example, circle.goal.leader and circle.goal.leaders are less than 1.2 miles (2km) apart along the River Thames. I wonder if the algorithm could somehow make it so similar sounding words like this aren’t anywhere near each other physically. It’s not as big a problem that leader and leaders sound the same, if you guarantee that only one of them is in the UK or at least within the same city/national park etc.

gambiting 5y ago
It's literally in the article: "So, for example, circle.goal.leader and circle.goal.leaders are less than 1.2 miles (2km) apart along the River Thames." That's potentially catastrophic, without an easy way to spot the mistake.
- mdoms 5y ago
  That's the exact example used in the comment you're replying to...?
  - gambiting 5y ago
    Unless I was asleep replying(there is a 5% chance of that), I'm pretty sure their comment didn't say that at the time.
stouset 5y ago
Such an example is presented in the article.

gfaure 5y ago

Here’s the result of @cybergibbons’ reverse engineering into the distribution over w3w terms that only differ in singular vs. plural: https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-suitable-for-safety-critical-applications/ https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su...

noplzno 5y ago

Morse code and other maybe newer concise encodings are inevitable.

mdoms 5y ago

What? Why not just give a fucking location? What the hell is this?

jokoon 5y ago
The goal is to share a precise enough location without copy pasting, so with spellable and memorable words.

m12k 5y ago

Sounds like they need to prune the word list and/or group together possible mispronunciations, misspellings and misreadings. If "correct horse battery" is a location, then "correct hose battery" and "correct house battery" need to be synonyms of the same location, not alternate locations. Either that or remove horse, hose and house from the word list entirely.

VBprogrammer 5y ago
Shouldn't those things be as far apart as possible? Then the conversation would be Person: "emm, I'm lost on the Yorkshire Moors...". Rescuer: "no problem sir, just take advantage of the completely flawless wireless telephony system we have to download this app..." Person: "ok, it says I'm at correct house battery" Rescuer: "hmm, I'm showing you at the top of a mountain in Nepal. Let's try that again..."
- m12k 5y ago
  I think if this is to be used by emergency services, then the time it takes to go "Let's try that again..." could mean the difference between life and death. I'd rather the system were designed in a way not just to make human error detectable, but rather make it not an error in the first place. (and I assume you're joking about asking someone to download an app they don't already have while on a call with emergency services, that can obviously never be the best solution)
- LorenPechtel 5y ago
  It would be safe enough if the ones that are close are *guaranteed* to be exceedingly far apart and the lookup algorithm allowed specifying an area. If correct horse battery is in England and correct house battery is in China and you have a well designed lookup it would know you're looking for something in England. correct house battery is in China at x, y. Do you mean correct horse battery in England at z, w? The real danger comes when the mistakes are a few miles apart.

noplzno 5y ago

once we escape our ubiquitious communication problem we will have no issues understanding one another

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mro_name 5y ago

I have to mention Geohash because it's easy to spell, licence free, variable precision, what else? Plug: https://demo.mro.name/geohash.cgi https://demo.mro.name/geohash.cgi That said, having familiar words in your (local?) alphabet is charming. But for public good it HAS to be public domain (the alphabet + algo, not the service, however).

dang 5y ago

Recent and related: Why What3Words is not suitable for safety critical applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058271 - May 2021 (35 comments) Why What3Words is not suitable for safety critical applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27029706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27029706 - May 2021 (3 comments) What3Words: App used by emergency services under scrutiny - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26985759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26985759 - April 2021 (14 comments)

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jokoon 5y ago

I always thought that a combination of a geohash-like z order curve over a 15km radius, with an offline gps coordinates list of the 5000 most populated cities on earth would be sufficient to cover 99% of people on earth. Not sure what's the average number of characters required for a 20m to 100m precision with such method. It's true that the idea of plus codes of using city names makes a lot of sense.

mro_name 5y ago
I once heard a really unique orientation talk about http://www.volksnav.com http://www.volksnav.com – based on the idea of polar coordinates like on an imagined clock dial flat on earth centered at your local reference point (e.g. city center) and 12 o'clock = south. Used in one city in Brazil, I think.

mikewarot 5y ago

One of my favorite atomic tourism sites is near charm files rush (Red Gate Woods, outside Chicago, home to the remains of Chicago Piles 2 and 3), or is it charm file rush (Which is in Brazil), or is it charms file rush, on the border between New Hampshire and Maine? Not a good system.