9 ms·

FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative

90 points by nodoodles 4y ago

sixhobbits 4y ago
What stops W3W legal team shutting down this ohe like they did to the other open source implementation?
- netsyms 4y ago
  Hi, I'm the guy who made FixPhrase. Their (100% invalid anyways) patent has a convoluted process to convert coordinates to/from words. FixPhrase just takes the coordinates, chops them up into four smaller numbers, then uses those numbers to look up the words in the corresponding (numbered) list. W3W doesn't have a patent on looking up words by array index.
- 1970-01-01 4y ago
  I would also like to know why this isn't considered patent infringement. https://patents.justia.com/assignee/what3words-limited https://patents.justia.com/assignee/what3words-limited --- I've poked around the website. They claim an "open-source, patent-free algorithm" is used, and therefore the entire concept doesn't infringe on W3W's patents. Yikes. They can expect letters and lawyers. https://source.netsyms.com/Netsyms/fixphrase.com/wiki/How-It-Works https://source.netsyms.com/Netsyms/fixphrase.com/wiki/How-It...
  - teraflop 4y ago
    The fact that W3W managed to get their patent issued is pretty hilarious in light of this: https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/13629/i-had-invented-and-published-before-this-patent-application-how-do-i-get-it-in https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/13629/i-had-inve...
samwillis 4y ago
It looks like the key difference between this and what3words is that squares near each other have mostly the same words. With only the last word changing for adjacent squares, and even then they are similar. I can see the motivation for this (you can abbreviate to fewer words for a general area), but alto suspect it is partially about the W3w patent. However it also increases the risk of being slightly wrong with a location, w3w is good for things like emergency rescue as you can’t be slightly wrong.
- croes 4y ago
  "However, security researcher Andrew Tierney demonstrated in 2021 that the What3words algorithm does not sufficiently protect against confusion between nearby locations because it may assign words that are similarly spelled or pronounced, which can limit the value of the system when a precise and unambiguous location is required, like safety-critical applications. Analysis by Tierney showed that close repetitions and the use of plurals occur in physically close locations. The company says that this has a one in 2.5 million chance of occurrence, but Tierney's analysis has highlighted areas where the odds are around 1 in 500." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words#Criticism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words#Criticism
- kybernetikos 4y ago
  Why would it increase the risk of being slightly wrong? If anything, it helps to have consistent prefixes because you make it more likely that someone will be able to recognise areas, or know when places are near to other places. If the system allows it, you can also use fewer words to target a bigger area. For example https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/ https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/ is an area of Paris, while https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/rate/thunder https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/rate/thunder is a specific point in the Gare du Nord. Or if you're standing in Paris, talking to someone else in Paris, you can use context and drop the 'juniper'. The only real reason I think it can be good to avoid a hierarchy is because having one makes the sensitivity of the word list much more significant. For example, if an entire country has a negative association word like 'stingy' or 'lying' in its first word, that could be a significant problem. If you really need a checksum, https://wherewords.id/ https://wherewords.id/ supports an optional emoji checksum.
  - yardstick 4y ago
    The risk comes from mishearing someone. Especially relevant in Europe with all the different accents. With w3w, Gare Du Nord is sunshine.frame.acted while sunshine.frames.acted is Abu Dhabi and sunshine.frame.actor is in Malaysia. https://what3words.com/sunshine.frame.acted https://what3words.com/sunshine.frame.acted https://what3words.com/sunshine.frames.acted https://what3words.com/sunshine.frames.acted https://what3words.com/sunshine.frames.actor https://what3words.com/sunshine.frames.actor While in wherewords.id, changing rate to fate or late or gate still produces Paris, but wrong location. https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/rate/thunder https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/rate/thunder https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/fate/thunder https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/fate/thunder https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/late/thunder https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/late/thunder Having an accurate location is important for emergency services. If you’re on a phone call trying to get an ambulance for someone having a seizure, or reporting a fire, shooting, whatever, it’s important to get the accurate location straight away. If the call centre person misheard your location, but the code is still in Paris, they will think it’s correct and dispatch to the wrong location. It would take too much time after realising the mistake to get the correct location. So with w3w it is far more obvious when these issues happen as suddenly the map is showing as Middle East or Asia, not Paris! I don’t think an emoji checksum would help here either. Wink. Was that a tongue wink or smirk or etc. (Full disclaimer: I don’t see the point in w3w either. It assumes people are prepared in advance to have the app on their phone, otherwise if they need to download it/visit its site they have internet so there are better ways of getting the location)
ortusdux 4y ago
I picked a random location and got "daringly kleenex sloppily very". Are there any issues with the fact that "kleenex" is a registered trademark?
- beeneuf 4y ago
  Kleenex is widely viewed as a genericized trademark and appears as an English word in the Merriam-Webster and Oxford dictionaries, which this may use as a source.
baal80spam 4y ago
I'm trying to think of a use case for such a service. Any ideas?
- stop50 4y ago
  For places that don't have an adress or the adress is ambigious
- Ayesh 4y ago
  Telling a location over the phone when you are in an emergency comes to mind. Easier to remember than a series of numbers as is the case latitude/longitude.
  - bloak 4y ago
    > Easier to remember Non-rhetorical question: who has to remember it and why? Is this primarily a work-around for the problem of it not being possible for a mobile phone handset to display the location during a voice call? If so, maybe someone should fix that problem because there might be other things that the caller might want to refer to on the screen while calling. It's slightly hilarious, in a way. I can imagine a conversation with the inventor: How much memory does a typical phone have? And you're telling me that we should use this proprietary system for encoding coordinates so that the user can more easily memorise the coordinates? Tell me, do you use a similar system for memorising your friends' telephone numbers? Of course in the case of emergency calls it really should not be beyond the wit of man to implement a system so that the owner of a phone can configure it to automatically send its location to the other party when an emergency call is initiated. I'm fairly privacy-conscious but I'd probably enable that one.
    - kybernetikos 4y ago
      > tell me, do you use a similar system for memorising your friends' telephone numbers? I have used the major system for memorizing numbers including phone numbers. It's a very similar system. Long streams of numbers are not great for memorizability or accurate entry or human communication. Did you ever try https://file.pizza/ https://file.pizza/ ? This is also why private keys are typically described as a sequence of words from a wordlist. Used in blockchains, PGP, keybase, etc. It does solve a real problem.
toolz 4y ago
neither this nor w3w are as useful as googles already open source https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ in my opinion. With plus codes you can both have a short, memorable address and gauge relative distance with other nearby addresses. I'm not sure I can think of a reason to ever use fixphrase or w3w as an alternative to this already existing open standard.
- pkulak 4y ago
  w3w considers the disambiguity an asset. Almost like a check sum. If you enter an address, and it's in the middle of the Pacific, you know you wrote it down wrong.
  - toolz 4y ago
    that's an interesting point, but in practice I don't see how it's meaningful. If you write down a plus code and end up in a similar area, you contact the person with the address and figure it out without much issue. If you can't contact that person again, well you're at least most likely to be in the area and can ask around for directions. with w3w if you can't contact the person with the address again, you've no idea where on the planet this place might be.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - regularfry 4y ago
    They claim disambiguity as an asset. It turns out it's not that hard to find ambiguous pairs close enough to be problematic.
    - pkulak 4y ago
      Well, you can find CRC collisions too without much work. Doesn't mean they are useless though. As long as they are guarding against error and not malice.
- kybernetikos 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kybernetikos 4y ago
This is a bit like my http://wherewords.id http://wherewords.id that I made as a fun holiday project. I used the S2 cells (same as the one used by pokemon go), and my own wordlist. Using this approach, I believe I got accuracy down to squares of approximately 2x2 metres with 4 words (from a wordlist of 4096 words). FixPhrase only claims accuracy of 11m, which isn't terrible, but won't locate a single parking space or front door particularly well. The wordlist is surprisingly hard work. The first location I clicked on fixphrase had as one of its words 'french'. That's potentially pretty confusing. It's super hard to get a good wordlist, and it's not just negative words, words that are particularly unusual or words likely to create bad combinations, it's also removing homonyms, words likely to be confused (capital/capitol, carless/careless), geographic words, or words that are combinations of other words in the word list.
- M3L0NM4N 4y ago
  If their accuracy is 11m, can we calculate their wordlist size?
  - kybernetikos 4y ago
    Their wordlist is 7610 words long and is here https://source.netsyms.com/Netsyms/fixphrase.com/src/branch/master/js/wordlist.json https://source.netsyms.com/Netsyms/fixphrase.com/src/branch/... I talk a little about my own wordlist choice here http://wherewords.id/+about http://wherewords.id/+about my word list is here https://github.com/kybernetikos/wherewords/blob/main/lib/wordlist/12bits-oc-v1.1.js https://github.com/kybernetikos/wherewords/blob/main/lib/wor...
- thechao 4y ago
  Why not a much shorter list with adjectives? I think the last time I looked at this, a few disjoint lists of 256 words, plus a few 16 word adjective lists gets down to ~1m accuracy. Dropping adjectives just reduces accuracy. > big red plate, small fuzzy ball, wavy green brick With three disjoint short lists, and two disjoint adjective lists you get permutation robustness.
  - 4y ago
barryp 4y ago
Hah, the location of my house is interesting - that'll be fun asking for a pizza or a fire truck sent to "corrosive filth ....."
ReflectedImage 4y ago
The work behind what3words isn't the algorithm. It's the word list used. They have linguistics who check the sounds of words, are they too similar to another word are they rude, etc, etc..
- CompuHacker 4y ago
  It'd be interesting to apply a Hilbert curve [0] to the Earth with the PGP Word List, with the even/odd list being used for each hemisphere, or used normally as a check. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_curve [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list
  - kybernetikos 4y ago
    This is basically what S2 the library I use in https://wherewords.id https://wherewords.id does, except I don't use the pgp word list because it is too short and would lead to requiring too many words per place.
- Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
  Well, the majority of the work behind w3w is the marketing.
CompuHacker 4y ago
0, 0 catatonic magnetism sandworm swimsuit "Null Island" 90, 0 abacus magnetism sandworm swimsuit "South Pole" -90, 0 "North Pole" 85.0511, 0 detonator magnetism snowboard theft "South Limit" -85.0511, 0 activity magnetism smudge vicinity "North Limit" 0, -90 catatonic gloater sandworm swimsuit "Easter Island" 0, 90 catatonic pogo sandworm swimsuit "Indian Ocean" 0, 180 catatonic sandblast sandworm swimsuit "East Limit" 0, -180 catatonic driver sandworm swimsuit "West Limit" Latitude is limited to ±85.0511 in OSM and Google Maps. Could someone request the words for "90, 0" and "-90, 0" manually? Second line above is glitchy but seems to be off-map South, at the pole, as expected.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  You can use "FixPhrase.encode(lat, lon)" in the browser console. 0, 0 catatonic magnetism sandworm swimsuit 90, 0 dimmed magnetism sandworm swimsuit -90, 0 abacus magnetism sandworm swimsuit 0, -90 catatonic gloater sandworm swimsuit 0, 90 catatonic pogo sandworm swimsuit 0, 180 catatonic sandblast sandworm swimsuit 0, -180 catatonic driver sandworm swimsuit
Brajeshwar 4y ago
So, What3Words is marketing and advertising heavily in India and I have to kinda chuckle at the complexities of the words that are not as common as we speak in everyday English. Try saying "interacts.scrapped.evoked" to an Uber driver and he would cancel you instantly.
craftuser 4y ago
I think it's a notably funny coincidence that "contact finance" is the prefix for some pretty expensive real estate.
zimpenfish 4y ago
Would be helpful if it accepted UK versions of the words - my current location includes "stylized" but replacing that by "stylised" (as you might well after hearing it on the phone) fails and just returns "London, vaguely". (cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31830437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31830437 )
- nicbou 4y ago
  Or flour, flower, floor... GPS coordinates are better.
  - kybernetikos 4y ago
    All the wordlists I know for these kinds of applications remove trivial homophones. Some wordlist use words that are uniquely identifiable after some set prefix length (e.g. 4 characters) or use metaphone codes so you can type anything that sounds roughly right (e.g. keewee is the same as kiwi).
    - nicbou 4y ago
      Do they? Flower, flour, ants, hence, its, hits, tits, lead, led, lead, let, lit. It's especially hard in a language where spelling doesn't always suggest the wright pronunciation: read and read, lead and lead. Sometimes, the combination of words can also be confusing, because you can't tell where the words end. before.head, bee.forehead. Another issue I remember was that the plural version pointed to a different place altogether. I used w3w (the triwords are great drawing prompts), and I had to repeat them multiple times to my friend drawing across the table. I didn't remember them after drawing them for a few minutes.
      - kybernetikos 4y ago
        Ah yes, you're right w3w has an enormous wordlist which isn't great. The metaphone wordlist I was talking about is verbal-id https://github.com/bandrews/verbal-id#readme https://github.com/bandrews/verbal-id#readme which shouldn't suffer from the problems you mention. > verbalid.parse("vacant brand orchestra kiwi") '8aab9b999' > verbalid.parse("vaycant brahnd orchistra keewee") '8aab9b999' My own wordlist has 'flower' but not 'flour', neither 'ants' nor 'hence', none of 'its', 'hits' or 'tits', neither 'lead' nor 'led', and 'let' but not 'lit', precisely because of the problems you mentioned. I went through my wordlist automatically first of all (with soundex filtering), then manually afterwards, trying to spot all of these problems and removing them.
spants 4y ago
For fun, https://twitter.com/what3rudewords https://twitter.com/what3rudewords
bethling 4y ago
At least for me, when I put in my address, it finds a similarly named, but incorrect address. Makes it a little hard to use :-/
goplayoutside 4y ago
Related: Cybergibbons: Why What3Words is not suitable for safety critical applications (2021)[1] HN discussion here[2]. [1] https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-suitable-for-safety-critical-applications/ https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058271

90 points by nodoodles 4y ago

sixhobbits 4y ago

What stops W3W legal team shutting down this ohe like they did to the other open source implementation?

netsyms 4y ago
Hi, I'm the guy who made FixPhrase. Their (100% invalid anyways) patent has a convoluted process to convert coordinates to/from words. FixPhrase just takes the coordinates, chops them up into four smaller numbers, then uses those numbers to look up the words in the corresponding (numbered) list. W3W doesn't have a patent on looking up words by array index.
1970-01-01 4y ago
I would also like to know why this isn't considered patent infringement. https://patents.justia.com/assignee/what3words-limited https://patents.justia.com/assignee/what3words-limited --- I've poked around the website. They claim an "open-source, patent-free algorithm" is used, and therefore the entire concept doesn't infringe on W3W's patents. Yikes. They can expect letters and lawyers. https://source.netsyms.com/Netsyms/fixphrase.com/wiki/How-It-Works https://source.netsyms.com/Netsyms/fixphrase.com/wiki/How-It...
- teraflop 4y ago
  The fact that W3W managed to get their patent issued is pretty hilarious in light of this: https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/13629/i-had-invented-and-published-before-this-patent-application-how-do-i-get-it-in https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/13629/i-had-inve...

samwillis 4y ago

It looks like the key difference between this and what3words is that squares near each other have mostly the same words. With only the last word changing for adjacent squares, and even then they are similar. I can see the motivation for this (you can abbreviate to fewer words for a general area), but alto suspect it is partially about the W3w patent. However it also increases the risk of being slightly wrong with a location, w3w is good for things like emergency rescue as you can’t be slightly wrong.

croes 4y ago
"However, security researcher Andrew Tierney demonstrated in 2021 that the What3words algorithm does not sufficiently protect against confusion between nearby locations because it may assign words that are similarly spelled or pronounced, which can limit the value of the system when a precise and unambiguous location is required, like safety-critical applications. Analysis by Tierney showed that close repetitions and the use of plurals occur in physically close locations. The company says that this has a one in 2.5 million chance of occurrence, but Tierney's analysis has highlighted areas where the odds are around 1 in 500." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words#Criticism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words#Criticism
kybernetikos 4y ago
Why would it increase the risk of being slightly wrong? If anything, it helps to have consistent prefixes because you make it more likely that someone will be able to recognise areas, or know when places are near to other places. If the system allows it, you can also use fewer words to target a bigger area. For example https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/ https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/ is an area of Paris, while https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/rate/thunder https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/rate/thunder is a specific point in the Gare du Nord. Or if you're standing in Paris, talking to someone else in Paris, you can use context and drop the 'juniper'. The only real reason I think it can be good to avoid a hierarchy is because having one makes the sensitivity of the word list much more significant. For example, if an entire country has a negative association word like 'stingy' or 'lying' in its first word, that could be a significant problem. If you really need a checksum, https://wherewords.id/ https://wherewords.id/ supports an optional emoji checksum.
- yardstick 4y ago
  The risk comes from mishearing someone. Especially relevant in Europe with all the different accents. With w3w, Gare Du Nord is sunshine.frame.acted while sunshine.frames.acted is Abu Dhabi and sunshine.frame.actor is in Malaysia. https://what3words.com/sunshine.frame.acted https://what3words.com/sunshine.frame.acted https://what3words.com/sunshine.frames.acted https://what3words.com/sunshine.frames.acted https://what3words.com/sunshine.frames.actor https://what3words.com/sunshine.frames.actor While in wherewords.id, changing rate to fate or late or gate still produces Paris, but wrong location. https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/rate/thunder https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/rate/thunder https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/fate/thunder https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/fate/thunder https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/late/thunder https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/late/thunder Having an accurate location is important for emergency services. If you’re on a phone call trying to get an ambulance for someone having a seizure, or reporting a fire, shooting, whatever, it’s important to get the accurate location straight away. If the call centre person misheard your location, but the code is still in Paris, they will think it’s correct and dispatch to the wrong location. It would take too much time after realising the mistake to get the correct location. So with w3w it is far more obvious when these issues happen as suddenly the map is showing as Middle East or Asia, not Paris! I don’t think an emoji checksum would help here either. Wink. Was that a tongue wink or smirk or etc. (Full disclaimer: I don’t see the point in w3w either. It assumes people are prepared in advance to have the app on their phone, otherwise if they need to download it/visit its site they have internet so there are better ways of getting the location)

ortusdux 4y ago

I picked a random location and got "daringly kleenex sloppily very". Are there any issues with the fact that "kleenex" is a registered trademark?

beeneuf 4y ago
Kleenex is widely viewed as a genericized trademark and appears as an English word in the Merriam-Webster and Oxford dictionaries, which this may use as a source.

baal80spam 4y ago

I'm trying to think of a use case for such a service. Any ideas?

stop50 4y ago
For places that don't have an adress or the adress is ambigious
Ayesh 4y ago
Telling a location over the phone when you are in an emergency comes to mind. Easier to remember than a series of numbers as is the case latitude/longitude.
- bloak 4y ago
  > Easier to remember Non-rhetorical question: who has to remember it and why? Is this primarily a work-around for the problem of it not being possible for a mobile phone handset to display the location during a voice call? If so, maybe someone should fix that problem because there might be other things that the caller might want to refer to on the screen while calling. It's slightly hilarious, in a way. I can imagine a conversation with the inventor: How much memory does a typical phone have? And you're telling me that we should use this proprietary system for encoding coordinates so that the user can more easily memorise the coordinates? Tell me, do you use a similar system for memorising your friends' telephone numbers? Of course in the case of emergency calls it really should not be beyond the wit of man to implement a system so that the owner of a phone can configure it to automatically send its location to the other party when an emergency call is initiated. I'm fairly privacy-conscious but I'd probably enable that one.
  - kybernetikos 4y ago
    > tell me, do you use a similar system for memorising your friends' telephone numbers? I have used the major system for memorizing numbers including phone numbers. It's a very similar system. Long streams of numbers are not great for memorizability or accurate entry or human communication. Did you ever try https://file.pizza/ https://file.pizza/ ? This is also why private keys are typically described as a sequence of words from a wordlist. Used in blockchains, PGP, keybase, etc. It does solve a real problem.

toolz 4y ago

neither this nor w3w are as useful as googles already open source https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ in my opinion. With plus codes you can both have a short, memorable address and gauge relative distance with other nearby addresses. I'm not sure I can think of a reason to ever use fixphrase or w3w as an alternative to this already existing open standard.

pkulak 4y ago
w3w considers the disambiguity an asset. Almost like a check sum. If you enter an address, and it's in the middle of the Pacific, you know you wrote it down wrong.
- toolz 4y ago
  that's an interesting point, but in practice I don't see how it's meaningful. If you write down a plus code and end up in a similar area, you contact the person with the address and figure it out without much issue. If you can't contact that person again, well you're at least most likely to be in the area and can ask around for directions. with w3w if you can't contact the person with the address again, you've no idea where on the planet this place might be.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- regularfry 4y ago
  They claim disambiguity as an asset. It turns out it's not that hard to find ambiguous pairs close enough to be problematic.
  - pkulak 4y ago
    Well, you can find CRC collisions too without much work. Doesn't mean they are useless though. As long as they are guarding against error and not malice.
kybernetikos 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kybernetikos 4y ago

This is a bit like my http://wherewords.id http://wherewords.id that I made as a fun holiday project. I used the S2 cells (same as the one used by pokemon go), and my own wordlist. Using this approach, I believe I got accuracy down to squares of approximately 2x2 metres with 4 words (from a wordlist of 4096 words). FixPhrase only claims accuracy of 11m, which isn't terrible, but won't locate a single parking space or front door particularly well. The wordlist is surprisingly hard work. The first location I clicked on fixphrase had as one of its words 'french'. That's potentially pretty confusing. It's super hard to get a good wordlist, and it's not just negative words, words that are particularly unusual or words likely to create bad combinations, it's also removing homonyms, words likely to be confused (capital/capitol, carless/careless), geographic words, or words that are combinations of other words in the word list.

M3L0NM4N 4y ago
If their accuracy is 11m, can we calculate their wordlist size?
- kybernetikos 4y ago
  Their wordlist is 7610 words long and is here https://source.netsyms.com/Netsyms/fixphrase.com/src/branch/master/js/wordlist.json https://source.netsyms.com/Netsyms/fixphrase.com/src/branch/... I talk a little about my own wordlist choice here http://wherewords.id/+about http://wherewords.id/+about my word list is here https://github.com/kybernetikos/wherewords/blob/main/lib/wordlist/12bits-oc-v1.1.js https://github.com/kybernetikos/wherewords/blob/main/lib/wor...
thechao 4y ago
Why not a much shorter list with adjectives? I think the last time I looked at this, a few disjoint lists of 256 words, plus a few 16 word adjective lists gets down to ~1m accuracy. Dropping adjectives just reduces accuracy. > big red plate, small fuzzy ball, wavy green brick With three disjoint short lists, and two disjoint adjective lists you get permutation robustness.
- 4y ago

barryp 4y ago

Hah, the location of my house is interesting - that'll be fun asking for a pizza or a fire truck sent to "corrosive filth ....."

ReflectedImage 4y ago

The work behind what3words isn't the algorithm. It's the word list used. They have linguistics who check the sounds of words, are they too similar to another word are they rude, etc, etc..

CompuHacker 4y ago
It'd be interesting to apply a Hilbert curve [0] to the Earth with the PGP Word List, with the even/odd list being used for each hemisphere, or used normally as a check. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_curve [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list
- kybernetikos 4y ago
  This is basically what S2 the library I use in https://wherewords.id https://wherewords.id does, except I don't use the pgp word list because it is too short and would lead to requiring too many words per place.
Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
Well, the majority of the work behind w3w is the marketing.

CompuHacker 4y ago

0, 0 catatonic magnetism sandworm swimsuit "Null Island" 90, 0 abacus magnetism sandworm swimsuit "South Pole" -90, 0 "North Pole" 85.0511, 0 detonator magnetism snowboard theft "South Limit" -85.0511, 0 activity magnetism smudge vicinity "North Limit" 0, -90 catatonic gloater sandworm swimsuit "Easter Island" 0, 90 catatonic pogo sandworm swimsuit "Indian Ocean" 0, 180 catatonic sandblast sandworm swimsuit "East Limit" 0, -180 catatonic driver sandworm swimsuit "West Limit" Latitude is limited to ±85.0511 in OSM and Google Maps. Could someone request the words for "90, 0" and "-90, 0" manually? Second line above is glitchy but seems to be off-map South, at the pole, as expected.

zamadatix 4y ago
You can use "FixPhrase.encode(lat, lon)" in the browser console. 0, 0 catatonic magnetism sandworm swimsuit 90, 0 dimmed magnetism sandworm swimsuit -90, 0 abacus magnetism sandworm swimsuit 0, -90 catatonic gloater sandworm swimsuit 0, 90 catatonic pogo sandworm swimsuit 0, 180 catatonic sandblast sandworm swimsuit 0, -180 catatonic driver sandworm swimsuit

Brajeshwar 4y ago

So, What3Words is marketing and advertising heavily in India and I have to kinda chuckle at the complexities of the words that are not as common as we speak in everyday English. Try saying "interacts.scrapped.evoked" to an Uber driver and he would cancel you instantly.

craftuser 4y ago

I think it's a notably funny coincidence that "contact finance" is the prefix for some pretty expensive real estate.

zimpenfish 4y ago

Would be helpful if it accepted UK versions of the words - my current location includes "stylized" but replacing that by "stylised" (as you might well after hearing it on the phone) fails and just returns "London, vaguely". (cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31830437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31830437 )

nicbou 4y ago
Or flour, flower, floor... GPS coordinates are better.
- kybernetikos 4y ago
  All the wordlists I know for these kinds of applications remove trivial homophones. Some wordlist use words that are uniquely identifiable after some set prefix length (e.g. 4 characters) or use metaphone codes so you can type anything that sounds roughly right (e.g. keewee is the same as kiwi).
  - nicbou 4y ago
    Do they? Flower, flour, ants, hence, its, hits, tits, lead, led, lead, let, lit. It's especially hard in a language where spelling doesn't always suggest the wright pronunciation: read and read, lead and lead. Sometimes, the combination of words can also be confusing, because you can't tell where the words end. before.head, bee.forehead. Another issue I remember was that the plural version pointed to a different place altogether. I used w3w (the triwords are great drawing prompts), and I had to repeat them multiple times to my friend drawing across the table. I didn't remember them after drawing them for a few minutes.
    - kybernetikos 4y ago
      Ah yes, you're right w3w has an enormous wordlist which isn't great. The metaphone wordlist I was talking about is verbal-id https://github.com/bandrews/verbal-id#readme https://github.com/bandrews/verbal-id#readme which shouldn't suffer from the problems you mention. > verbalid.parse("vacant brand orchestra kiwi") '8aab9b999' > verbalid.parse("vaycant brahnd orchistra keewee") '8aab9b999' My own wordlist has 'flower' but not 'flour', neither 'ants' nor 'hence', none of 'its', 'hits' or 'tits', neither 'lead' nor 'led', and 'let' but not 'lit', precisely because of the problems you mentioned. I went through my wordlist automatically first of all (with soundex filtering), then manually afterwards, trying to spot all of these problems and removing them.

spants 4y ago

For fun, https://twitter.com/what3rudewords https://twitter.com/what3rudewords

bethling 4y ago

At least for me, when I put in my address, it finds a similarly named, but incorrect address. Makes it a little hard to use :-/

goplayoutside 4y ago

Related: Cybergibbons: Why What3Words is not suitable for safety critical applications (2021)[1] HN discussion here[2]. [1] https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-suitable-for-safety-critical-applications/ https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058271