3 ms·

I may be missing something here, but it seems like this solves only half of the problem. Sure it's helpful to cover the earth in 3m squares with unique names,

I may be missing something here, but it seems like this solves only half of the problem. Sure it's helpful to cover the earth in 3m squares with unique names, but in order to actually deliver something you need to be able to navigate to it. The advantage of a (building number, street name, locality) address is that it identifies some point on the edge of a graph, and that the edges and vertices are well-known. I'll grant that within any locality, people generally know how to get from point A to point B (and frequently don't know the names of the streets), but it seems like what you really need is a way to map the unique 3m squares onto that knowledge. Even with that problem solved, another problem comes up with planning deliveries efficiently. There's no information embedded in the what3words address that encodes any notion of adjacency or relative distance. I realize that this is probably intentional to reduce the likelihood of errors in addresses going unnoticed, but it means determining nearness requires access to the whole mapping data set (or at least enough to determine that a what3words address isn't in the set of ones you care about).

abstractbeliefs 12y ago
Those squares can be mapped back to regular lat/long and navigated by regular GPS/SatNav. I guess the main thing here is that we can now express "GPS coordinates" in easy to remember and human-friendly phrases.
- maemre 12y ago
  That is partially done with Geohash (http://geohash.org/ http://geohash.org/) and other variants. The actual step here is usage of dictionary words as digits for encoding instead of a bunch of random characters. Alternatively, such a system can be done by interleaving bitstrings for coordinates then converting the result to base 10000 or something and encoding each digit with a word. By using that you will get a little bit of hierarchy (the coordinates starting with same digits will correspond to sequences starting with same word). In this way we will know which zone starts with e.g. chocolate.kit.photo then it will be easier to navigate. Of course it won't beat a graph-based solution like street and building numbers.
klhutchins 12y ago
I like how my home/property has ~70 addresses and none are similar. To use this I'll need to pick one and make sure its used exclusively, otherwise I'd not only confuse the postman, I'd confuse anyone I need to give location to. Without organization or structure of the words I don't see how it's helpful. Knowing the destination and my latitude and longitude, at least I'd know I was close, without having to reference this service. An new address solution should solve multiple issues, utilizing existing knowlege, without making it more difficult. Logical organization should be included. For example, we typically know where England or Canada is, or know the difference between SanDiego.California or adrar.algeria and subdivide from there. At least at this point, most people would know a general area without having to reference forgot.paved.ruler from an external source. "Hey meet me at forgot.paved.ruler, it's just down the way from mixers.gulls.sing, or was that sings?.." Forgetting that 's' puts you on another continent, but it's close enough?

abstractbeliefs 12y ago

Those squares can be mapped back to regular lat/long and navigated by regular GPS/SatNav. I guess the main thing here is that we can now express "GPS coordinates" in easy to remember and human-friendly phrases.

maemre 12y ago
That is partially done with Geohash (http://geohash.org/ http://geohash.org/) and other variants. The actual step here is usage of dictionary words as digits for encoding instead of a bunch of random characters. Alternatively, such a system can be done by interleaving bitstrings for coordinates then converting the result to base 10000 or something and encoding each digit with a word. By using that you will get a little bit of hierarchy (the coordinates starting with same digits will correspond to sequences starting with same word). In this way we will know which zone starts with e.g. chocolate.kit.photo then it will be easier to navigate. Of course it won't beat a graph-based solution like street and building numbers.

klhutchins 12y ago

I like how my home/property has ~70 addresses and none are similar. To use this I'll need to pick one and make sure its used exclusively, otherwise I'd not only confuse the postman, I'd confuse anyone I need to give location to. Without organization or structure of the words I don't see how it's helpful. Knowing the destination and my latitude and longitude, at least I'd know I was close, without having to reference this service. An new address solution should solve multiple issues, utilizing existing knowlege, without making it more difficult. Logical organization should be included. For example, we typically know where England or Canada is, or know the difference between SanDiego.California or adrar.algeria and subdivide from there. At least at this point, most people would know a general area without having to reference forgot.paved.ruler from an external source. "Hey meet me at forgot.paved.ruler, it's just down the way from mixers.gulls.sing, or was that sings?.." Forgetting that 's' puts you on another continent, but it's close enough?