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I feel like we could just boil this down to a math problem? Classic lat long uses, what? 10 decimal digits? Grouped into 2 sets of 5? Switching to base 26 can o
by twodave 3y ago
I feel like we could just boil this down to a math problem? Classic lat long uses, what? 10 decimal digits? Grouped into 2 sets of 5? Switching to base 26 can only really eliminate 1 digit from each set. That alone should make it pretty clear we aren’t going to make it much simpler. I suppose you could encode the whole thing as one set of 10 digits and maybe represent that as 7 alphanumeric characters, but now to share it over the phone you have to know a phonetic alphabet. Nah, let’s stick to numbers…
- joe__f 3y agoIf you're working with three words I don't see why base 26 would be relevant, I think you'd be looking at n^3 where n is the size of the set of words that you're considering. So wouldn't you just, split the 2-sphere into N squares of a certain size, and then each square has (lat,long) associated with it, and then you pick n so that n^3 > N and come up with a mapping between your N (lat, long) points and your set of n^3 three word sentences?
- twodave 3y agoI guess I wasn’t specifically trying to use 3 words but more just demonstrate that 10 decimal digits is about as simple as it gets in terms of clearly being able to communicate with that much precision over a low quality connection.
- joe__f 3y agoIt seems to me that you're demonstrating that What3Words doesn't provide precise coordinates on the globe to 3 decimal places. This is not surprising, given that they don't intend to do that, they chop the globe up into squares and provide less precision with easier human readability.