[HN Gopher] What3Words - The Algorithm
___________________________________________________________________
What3Words - The Algorithm
Author : ykat7
Score : 213 points
Date : 2021-05-02 13:19 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cybergibbons.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cybergibbons.com)
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I used to think that w3w is kinda neat and really liked them, but
| then I've learned that they basically stole the idea from some
| guy from India, and their predatory copyrastic practices.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I think I'm missing something. The algorithm shuffles to prevent
| words in adjacent squares from being the same? Why not just draw
| from the set of 3-permutations and if satisfies that adjacency
| constraint, remove from the pool of available permutations
| (conditional draw without replacement). A solution would only
| have to be found once anyway, right?
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Their business model is to own access to the dataset. They
| don't want hierarchy as they want people to be required to use
| their software every time they interact with these addresses.
| They're just scummy. There's no reason to use this scheme vs a
| hierarchical decomposition using something like S2.
| ZiiS wrote:
| Storing a full lookup database on every device is not pratical.
| qsort wrote:
| With ~3 million squares it would fit in a couple hundred
| megabytes at the very most, even without any compression. It
| may not be optimal, but it's certainly not unrealistic
| either.
| bspammer wrote:
| The squares are 9m^2, surface area of the earth is 510
| trillion m^2, so there's about 50 trillion squares. You're
| not fitting that in an app
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I think the surface area of the earth is 196,936,994 m^2
| That's 21,881,888 3x3 squares. The surface area of
| Jupiter is 23 trillion m^2.
| cybergibbons wrote:
| Your surface area is totally incorrect.
| noir_lord wrote:
| It is 510.1 trillion m2 (google result).
|
| 3x3 is 510.1/9 - 56 trillion (and change).
|
| > 196,936,994 m^2
|
| Is equivalent to a perfect square with sides 14km
| long...they say it's a small world..but not that small.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Again, I think I'm missing something. Apps don't maintain a
| complete local database or resource records for the domain
| name system either. We access name-servers for that
| information. So I think I'm missing the use case for this
| system.
| cybergibbons wrote:
| A design requirement of the app is it works offline.
| simonw wrote:
| What an extraordinary piece of analysis. Really thorough,
| detailed and well-explained work.
| [deleted]
| kybernetikos wrote:
| I did a words lat/long system as a couple day project at
| Christmas. https://wherewords.id/
|
| I used the google S2 mapping, and spent quite a bit of time on my
| own wordlist. I like the S2 mapping - it lets you use fewer words
| to refer to a bigger area. I write a little bit about it here:
| https://wherewords.id/+about
|
| I would have really liked to have found some good research on
| 'words that are hard to mistake when spoken aloud across various
| accents', but in the end I just spent ages going through my word
| list with various libraries and manually. And having friends
| point me to locations that had incredibly rude or offensive
| wherewords!
|
| Really there should be a free, open source word<->location system
| that we all just standardise on and build into GPS systems and
| maps, because a common, free system would be genuinely useful.
| rozab wrote:
| How many times has the wheel been reinvented with these
| phonetic word list schemes? Loads of crypto apps use them, e.g.
| for bitcoin wallet recovery. Do they all roll their own scheme?
| Someone should attempt to make a standard if none exists.
|
| Interoperability isn't even that important, I just want to pull
| something into my project.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| I originally planned to use the crypto bip39 wordlist but
| ultimately it proved not to be suitable. I talk a little
| about it https://wherewords.id/+about
| rozab wrote:
| Great summary, thanks
| snypher wrote:
| Crypto wallets may use BIP39 protocol, it might be close to a
| 'standard'?
|
| https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawi.
| ..
|
| Edit: 2048 English wordlist is here https://github.com/bitcoi
| n/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/english...
| ryebit wrote:
| In addition to BIP39 cited below, the EFF also published some
| useful wordlists a few years ago...
| https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-
| random-p...
|
| One has the nice property that all words have unique 3 letter
| prefix. But not as many in prefix list (1296) as their "long"
| list (7776).
|
| That said I'm kinda partial to BIP39... first four letters
| are unique, and words are more uniform than EFF prefix list.
|
| But it looks like GPS addressing schemes like w3w need a MUCH
| larger list by an order of magnitude.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| > But it looks like GPS addressing schemes like w3w need a
| MUCH larger list by an order of magnitude.
|
| If you're trying to get down to 3 words yes, but if you're
| happy with 4 words (and I am), then the long list would be
| more than enough. One problem I found was that I think
| people don't want strongly negative phrases being used to
| describe where they live. The BIP39 wordlist can create
| word groups that are very offensive, or that would feel
| rascist if applied to particular parts of the world. It
| also has words that are easily confused for other words
| like alter, aisle.
|
| I did use words from BIP39, but had to remove quite a few
| in the end for my wordlist (e.g. blast, load, black,
| finger, female etc.) because of the unfortunate clusters it
| could create.
|
| Ultimately, I think coming up with a good wordlist is still
| a bit of an unsolved problem. The ideal wordlist for
| something like this
|
| 1. can't form obviously rascist or overtly sexual word
| clusters
|
| 2. can be easily distinguished in spoken communication
|
| 3. can be easily distinguished in written communication
|
| 4. doesn't have words that sound similar to other words in
| any of the most common accents
|
| 5. doesn't have geographic words (it'd be confusing)
|
| 6. is mainly positive or neutral words
|
| 7. consists of words that are easy to spell, avoiding words
| that are commonly misspelled and where there are not
| different standard ways of spelling the words depending on
| region
|
| 8. has words that are not too long
|
| 9. doesn't contain words that are concatenations of other
| words in the wordlist
|
| Obviously not easy if you need a significant number of
| them.
| micheljansen wrote:
| I learned about pluscodes because of this and they seem quite
| elegant: https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/
| ehsankia wrote:
| The algorithm is also extremely simple, I've seen code golf
| with less than 100 char in most languages, and realistically
| just a couple lines of code.
|
| I like that you can recursively add more precision after the
| plus, as well as truncate some of the start if you provide
| context like the country or city. For example all of Montreal
| lives within the "87Q8" block, so I can just truncate that away
| if I specify that I'm in Montreal.
| wyager wrote:
| Doesn't the plus code algorithm rely on tiling the globe with
| a space filling curve? I'd be surprised if that could be done
| simply.
| CA0DA wrote:
| pluscodes are also known as "Open Location Code" and the github
| repo is: https://github.com/google/open-location-code
| rdpintqogeogsaa wrote:
| Going by other people's experience with them[0], I wonder how
| long this post will stay up.
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/AaronToponce/status/1387933438305394690
| boramalper wrote:
| For future reference,
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210502132217/https://cybergibb...
| detaro wrote:
| Given that cybergibbons has spent the past weeks looking into
| this very loudly and publicly, don't expect him to back down.
| ykat7 wrote:
| Aaron posted an update. As of an hour ago they "consider the
| matter closed":
| https://twitter.com/AaronToponce/status/1388828107407245312
| [deleted]
| dmitrykoval wrote:
| Story by TC - https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/30/what3words-
| legal-threat-wh...
| maxerickson wrote:
| The cat may be far enough out of the bag at this point.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Here [1] is the same thread on nitter (a twitter alternative
| that does not require Javascript to read). Other nitter
| instances can be seen here: [2]
|
| The twitter thread also contained a reference to this
| interesting article on "Why bother with What Three Words?"[3],
| which itself links to other interesting articles:
| [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]
|
| W3W is a neat core idea poorly thought through. Hopefully one
| day there'll be a truly open alternative that solves the many
| issues W3W itself has.
|
| [1] - https://nitter.cc/AaronToponce/status/1387933438305394690
|
| [2] - https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances
|
| [3] - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-
| three-...
|
| [4] - https://blog.ldodds.com/2016/06/14/what-3-words-jog-on-
| mate/
|
| [5] - https://knowwhereconsulting.co.uk/blog/location-grid-not-
| an-...
|
| [6] - https://medium.com/@piesse/open-location-code-
| what3words-74a...
|
| [7] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18646650
|
| [8] - https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-review-of-what3words
|
| [9] - https://stiobhart.net/2016-01-15-stupidest-idea-ever/
|
| [10] - http://blog.telemapics.com/?p=589
|
| [11] -
| https://www.grcdi.nl/Address_encoding_versus_traditional_add...
|
| [12] - https://www.grcdi.nl/linkspas.htm
| CA0DA wrote:
| check out Open Location Code (https://github.com/google/open-
| location-code) (aka PlusCodes)
| jedimastert wrote:
| I'm baffled they used any plurals at all. I feel like "only one
| form of a word" should have been near top priority for generating
| the dictionary. No plurals, no conjugations (even better would be
| to pick one conjugation, say, infinitive) maybe even no
| adjective/adverb forms of verb.
|
| I wonder how many words in the english language would be left? I
| know the english language is massive
| cybergibbons wrote:
| The word list already is 40k long. That's beyond most people's
| vocab and includes really awkward to spell words.
|
| IMO, if the solution is to use words, then What4Words would
| have had a word list of less than 3000, resulting in a word
| list with less confusable words and more accessible to children
| and people who struggle to read or write.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Spelling is the Achilles' heel of all word-based systems.
|
| People who have trouble with spelling (such as non-native
| speakers of whatever language the words come from or
| children) may not be able to rely on word-based systems.
| Word-based systems are also going to be hampered by speakers
| of different accents.
|
| Letter- and number-based systems are probably always going to
| be much more robust, especially when used with a standard
| phonetic alphabet[1]. There could even be a checksum
| letter/number to make the system even more robust.
| Unfortunately, such systems will never be as memorable or as
| easy to say as a few words (spelling issues aside).
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet
| flir wrote:
| > Spelling is the Achilles' heel of all word-based systems.
|
| Stick with nouns? Then you can use icons as supplements.
| Ball, Pen, Light bulb, Burger, Guitar.
|
| Possibly easier to translate between languages, too.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| How do you spell "guitar"?
|
| It's not spelled like it sounds, and not every English
| speaker (never mind people who can't speak English) is
| going to know how to spell it. Some may try to spell it
| "gitar", "geetar" or even "getar", for example. While
| these maybe be "obviously" wrong spelling for skilled
| spellers, they're not so for everyone.
|
| Even with a simple word like "ball", it's not obvious
| that it should have two l's at the end. Someone might
| spell it "bal" when they hear it.
|
| Spelling reform[1] movements have pointed out these and
| many other issues with English spelling, but
| unfortunately the alternatives they've come up with are
| just not widely known, and at least some of them still
| have their own problems (such as lack of standardization
| due to different phonemic spellings for words spoken by
| people with different accents).
|
| Even were there some magical alternate spelling system
| for English that was widely known among English speakers,
| it would still be a stumbling block for people who don't
| know English, as would the words of any other language..
| as long as there are people who don't speak that
| language.
|
| So any word-based system is going to be problematic and
| error-prone for some people.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_reform
| cortesoft wrote:
| We should clearly use Esperanto words.
| jameshart wrote:
| Ah yes, simple phonetic words like 'light' and
| 'guitar'...
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Spelling is very much an underappreciated problem. Written
| English is particularly bad, sometimes requiring
| memorization that's not much unlike Chinese characters,
| because of the written language not adapting to the vowel
| shifts and changes in pronunciation, as well as the mess of
| a history the language has gone through as it developed in
| the UK.
|
| Children, dyslexics, non-native speakers, all will have a
| hard time writing down many words even if they're part of
| the top 1000 list.
|
| With the right word set (avoiding homophones) and the
| presence of autocorrect (or an input only allowing the
| limited word list), you could probably create a pretty
| resilient system if you only take the most common words
| (top 1k would likely be sufficient). You'll need a longer
| address, but remembering six words is a lot easier than
| remembering six letters.
|
| Sadly, the entire concept is flawed and doomed for as long
| as the goons of What Three Words operate their business
| like a failed media company, sending out threats,
| falsifying legal documents to enforce takedown requests,
| and lawyering up to anyone who even considers applying
| "their" algorithm on their own. "Their" idea may be
| patentable in the US, but in areas of the world where there
| is no such patent, these goons cannot take down the
| competition without lying and dishonesty and they've shown
| to do anything to prevent any competitor from entering the
| market.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Using spelling correction on a limited word set that
| avoids ambiguities is a brilliant idea. It wouldn't solve
| every issue with word-based systems (for instance, people
| who don't speak the language will still have problems,
| and it obviously wouldn't be as reliable without a
| computer) but it's much better than W3W, and I hope
| whoever implements an open W3W alternative implements it.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| I did one of these for fun at the beginning of the year, and
| ended up needing to spend way more time on the wordlist than
| I'd expected. In the end I felt that a list of 4096 words was
| a decent compromise between accuracy and is still fairly
| managable for trying to remove words that are too easy to
| mistake for each other. It lets you do everywhere on earth to
| slightly more accuracy than what3words in 4 words.
|
| Something that what3words does is not have an obvious
| hierarchy of words (e.g. where the first one covers a larger
| area, and subsequent words home in). I didn't like that, but
| I understand why they do it - if a single word is going to
| cover a large area, you have to be extra careful that you
| don't choose something offensive for a particular region. By
| having no obvious structure, they get away with being less
| careful on the wordlist.
| eterm wrote:
| The issue of hierarchy is that it's orthogonal to having
| very different results for nearby areas.
|
| With a hierarchy you immediately run into, "Am I in
| gibbons.apple.banana or was it gibbons.apple.bandana" which
| is just down the road.
|
| Without hierarchy it jumps out that one of those results is
| improbable if tallied with any knowledge of roughly where
| the person is.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| As you say, the issues are orthogonal. I randomise my
| wordlist so places next to each other don't have words
| necessarily close to each other in the alphabet. But
| because it's hierarchical e.g. most places in the uk
| start 'bishop'. I think this is good because you learn to
| recognise places,but imagine if loads of places in India
| started with the word 'colony'... it's a problem you
| don't have to worry about if you don't use a hierarchical
| scheme.
|
| https://wherewords.id/
| noir_lord wrote:
| Funnily enough I did that math the other day when this kicked
| off.
|
| It comes out to 4th root of ((510.1 trillion)/9) which is
| ~2743.8
|
| Where it gets interesting is that it's only ~4752 for 1mx1m
| cells :)
|
| Another use for `Correct Horse Battery Staple` I guess.
| ehsankia wrote:
| > The word list already is 40k long
|
| To be fair, if the lookup table is created properly, the
| majority of habited locations should be within the first two
| bands, which means you're really only using 2500, or 5000 of
| those words. That was the whole point of the banding system,
| I assume.
| cybergibbons wrote:
| It's promoted for use in search and rescue, so other bands
| are in use.
| mike_d wrote:
| I used to do SAR. Lost persons do a terrible job of
| communicating because they are afraid and often
| emotionally and physically drained. But if you have them
| on a radio or a cell phone, you can generally locate them
| without the persons direct assistance.
|
| One of the many things that really annoys me about W3W is
| that it sucks for actual navigation. If I am at
| waffle.tire.sigh is that north or south of keys.sad.tree?
| Am I heading in the right direction?
| cybergibbons wrote:
| Yeah, multiple MRT members have contacted me to say this
| is a real struggle. If someone is on the move, it's
| virtually impossible to work out what direction they are
| going.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| And there was I thinking that the main problem with What3Words
| was a total lack of error detection/correction.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Is this algorithm based on the "clean room" reverse engineering
| effort?
| cybergibbons wrote:
| No, I went from the patent and using the API instead:
|
| https://twitter.com/cybergibbons/status/1386344576856825858
|
| https://twitter.com/cybergibbons/status/1386393951276609539
|
| https://twitter.com/cybergibbons/status/1386867562554793984
|
| https://twitter.com/cybergibbons/status/1387164507705860097
| [deleted]
| eruci wrote:
| I built a latlon<->word system using geonames as the source of
| the words. https://3geonames.org 146000 global place names in
| total.
|
| The first word is the name of the most important geographical
| location in the given area while the other 2 words are quasi
| random. https://3geonames.org/LONDON-MOSCOW-PARIS is next to
| https://3geonames.org/LONDON-MOSCOW-GASSIN . (places that are
| about 160 metres apart will share both the first and the second
| word)
|
| Lately I've been thinking of modifying the system to only use
| place names from the country where the point falls in, so you
| will only get British place names for locations that fall inside
| Great Britain. You could also modify the code (it is open source)
| to whatever you like.
|
| There is an infinite number of ways to skin this cat, but I doubt
| we will ever all agree on just one.
| rgovostes wrote:
| Seems confusing to me to describe a location using the names of
| unrelated other places. It would be even more confusing to
| limit the word set in the way you describe. "Where do you
| live?" "London-Oxford-Leeds." "Where is that?" "Outside
| Brighton."
| eruci wrote:
| https://3geonames.org/London-Oxford-Leeds can also be
| described as https://3geonames.org/LONDON-UAS
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| Everyone knows numbers. Just use semi accurate GPS co-ordinates.
| Been around for decades, and already built into that phone you
| are holding.
| userbinator wrote:
| Coordinates are also ordered and predictable, given your
| current position you can intuitively determine in what
| direction (and approximately how far) where other positions
| are.
| maxehmookau wrote:
| As an idea, what3words appears to exist only to make money for
| its owners.
|
| The UK already has an open, easy to use, well documented and
| battle-tested way of defining any point in the country. Grid
| references.
|
| What3Words doesn't actually solve a problem that isn't already
| solved.
| teachingassist wrote:
| What3Words accounts at Companies House in the UK are extremely
| interesting.
|
| They burned through just over PS15,000,000 in 2019, for a _total
| revenue_ just under PS400,000 from 100+ employees.
| mavhc wrote:
| Costs a lot to get all the free publicity from journalists, got
| to avoid them pointing out it's a private company trying to
| control access to a coordinate system, or mentioning any
| alternatives.
| ealexhudson wrote:
| I thought you were kidding, but apparently not. Even worse :
| PS320k of that revenue was from sales to Daimler AG (a
| shareholder) and is described as "services". I would love to
| understand the business model here, they've maintained PS23M
| ish cash at hand since end 2017 but I'm not clear what the play
| here is...
| trollied wrote:
| I think that PS23m is just capital from issued shares.
| Anyway, it's certainly not viable. I guess it remains to be
| seen how long investors will keep on chucking money at it to
| keep it afloat.
|
| Filing history, if anyone else is interested: https://find-
| and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
| ealexhudson wrote:
| No, it's definitely cash and equivalents. The shareholder
| account is virtually PS50m at this point, and they had
| nothing like that cash until the raises in 2017.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| I always wondered if they were actually used by anyone then I
| saw their recent advertising and it seems to focus on emergency
| services and finding places in large fields
|
| I created a project using an alternative method using gifs for
| directions: http://gif.direct which I personally think is more
| useful (if less refined!)
| kawsper wrote:
| They are dangerous for emergency services, here is a case
| where W3W showed a location many miles away:
| https://twitter.com/isleofmandan/status/1386455377949122561
|
| Someone have also compiled a list of pairs that only differs
| by one letter, like these two:
|
| instants.lightening.precedents
|
| instants.lightning.precedents
|
| You can see the whole map here:
| https://twitter.com/cybergibbons/status/1385891425108250626
|
| I wish they would just use "pluscodes" instead, the algorithm
| is opensource and doesn't depend on a specific dictionary:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code
| saalweachter wrote:
| You also need to distinguish between the contexts where you
| need addresses versus coordinates.
|
| Lat-longs, plus codes, and word-encoding schemes are all
| coordinates -- they identify a point or area on the globe.
|
| Addresses are last-mile navigational instructions. "Apt D,
| 123 Main St" allows anyone with local knowledge to navigate
| efficiently to the location indicated: first they drive to
| Main Street, then they proceed along the ~monotonically
| numbered parcels to 123, then continue to the apartment
| labeled "D".
|
| The advantage of coordinates is that they don't require
| local knowledge and can identify arbitrary points; the
| advantage of addresses is that they encode instructions for
| land navigation that takes into account which parts of the
| land are passable.
| andi999 wrote:
| What is wrong with classical coordinates for emergencies?
| Like 42 degrees north, 13 minutes and 4.5 seconds?
| blackboxlogic wrote:
| I know of one rescue that didn't go smoothly because there
| was confusion between degrees, minutes, seconds and decimal
| degrees.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| They've raised over PS80m. Astonishing.
|
| https://tech.eu/brief/london-based-location-tech-what3words-...
| tgv wrote:
| You mean people thought they were going to make a load of money
| with this? And that they spend 5 times more money on this
| simplistic google maps ripoff than the 40 employee company I
| work for, which runs a PS250k profit? I am baffled.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| A bunch of replies to this are "I implemented my own version of
| What3Words". That sport has been around for a few years now.
| https://what3emojis.com/ is probably the most long-lived; I'm
| writing from telephone bus eggplant. (Hacker News' lack of emoji
| support makes interop here a little difficult.)
|
| Unfortunately http://www.what3fucks.com/ seems to have ended
| their incredible journey.
|
| It's a really stupid idea for addressing, triply so when you
| consider the pathetic little proprietary word database that's
| What3Words tool for extracting rents. Geohash is the oldest
| system that solves the problem of "give me a short textual name
| for a place" and has a nice ability to get more precise.
| daleharvey wrote:
| A location near me
|
| geohash: gcuvz30z w3w: drift.march.donor
|
| I had to switch tabs 3 times to copy across the geohash since
| the page I found it on wouldnt let me copy and paste, I
| remembered the w3w immediately.
|
| I am 100% against something like a global addressing standard
| being owned by a single company, however the amount of people
| ignoring w3w's extremely obvious utility and pointing to
| pluscodes, geohashing, grid references, geocoords etc is pretty
| tiring.
|
| We have a standards body for emojis, cant we just agree on an
| open w3w implementation.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Nelson is right. A bunch of us have played around with
| designing our own human friendly geohash scheme.
|
| If you divide earth up into 4m x 4m cells using something
| like the S2 projection, you can uniquely address these using
| phrases of 3 words drawn from a database just under 32,000
| words. The S2 projection ensures that the words in the higher
| levels of the hierarchy will change quite slowly. In most
| local contexts there will be only a single commonly repeated
| word. In a small number of more exceptional points there'd be
| just 2 or 3 unique values in use. So in practice you could
| use longer addresses and a smaller dictionary if you liked.
| This is probably a good idea for ergonomic reasons, as we can
| pick a set of words that are readily translated between
| languages, weed out any that are overly similar, etc.
|
| I never uploaded the code anywhere, and it's on a laptop that
| died, but I busted out a toy version of the above in an
| afternoon a couple years ago just for fun. I used 4 word
| addresses and a database of about 2,500 of the most common
| english words.
|
| W3W's entire value proposition is that they should earn a
| global rent off the use of addresses vs the above. It's
| absurd. And they intentionally avoid hierarchical
| organization of the addresses specifically to make it
| necessary to use their app/service to look crap up, which
| makes their service hilariously worse than the scheme
| described above.
|
| With an S2 style hierarchy people will intuitively begin to
| recognize the common words in their living area at each
| level, and can use them in conversation without even
| consulting software. This is completely impossible with W3W's
| scheme.
|
| The problem isn't figuring out a good scheme. Most of the
| people on this forum can manage that in a couple hours. The
| problem is the same with all other standardization efforts:
| getting a critical mass of people who give enough of a crap
| to use the standard.
|
| This is an area where Google could ship something in maps and
| it'd have a decent chance of adoption outside of it. If you
| work on maps consider pitching a more ergonomic version of
| plus codes.
| real-dino wrote:
| > cant we just agree on an open w3w implementation.
|
| They don't want that to happen, at least not an open source
| implementation. They want to be in the position of Pantone
| and colour.
| tobr wrote:
| > I remembered the w3w immediately.
|
| But in what situation is this useful? How is it more
| convenient or useful than a regular address? Even if you're
| somewhere where there are no addresses, and you need to
| describe a location that has no other descriptive
| characteristics, isn't it a lot easier to just drop a
| pin/bookmark on the map in your smartphone? Especially
| considering you can't reasonably run the algorithm without a
| digital device of some kind.
| physicsguy wrote:
| It makes sense more in some countries than others.
|
| In Japan, for e.g. there are no street numbers.
|
| In the U.K. we have postal codes that _generally_ refer to
| a street. But they sometimes can be only a portion of a
| street, sometimes they're a building, sometimes they're a
| large business who might be across multiple sites. At other
| times (usually rural) they're very very long roads, so
| sticking the address into a Sat Nav takes you to that road
| but not the point on the road that you want to travel to.
| Because the system is so mixed, 99 /100 nthe address is
| absolutely fine, but occasionally it isn't. I agree
| dropping a pin is more useful though.
|
| Ireland had no postal codes at all until recently.
| daleharvey wrote:
| Transferring the location from one place to another
|
| So aside from the fact that my address has around a 50/50
| success rate with people trying to find it (My address is a
| building + street name that has a mirror building + street
| name across the other side of a motorway)
|
| Transferring the address, the obvious example people give
| is emergency services but this applies to so many
| situations, I volunteer with a litter picking group and
| they have found w3w extremely useful to communicate
| locations, you "can" transfer a pin but you need those
| devices set up to do a transfer already, with w3w I can
| check the website for the location on my way out the door
| and enter it to my map on the way, people who arent setup
| as contacts can transfer it without having to trade phone
| numbers etc.
|
| Its hard to understand how someone could not find a way to
| easily memorize and communicate a specific location a very
| useful thing?
| timita wrote:
| Which is absolutely fine in a non-critical scenario such
| as picking litter, or finding your mates at a festival.
| But, as the article demonstrates in detail, there are too
| many possibilities for error, which in a life or death
| scenario we cannot afford. Emergency services often deal
| with exactly that kind of scenario.
| kitd wrote:
| _But in what situation is this useful?_
|
| On the phone? There's a bit I don't like about W3W, but
| efficiency of communication is their killer feature.
| avianlyric wrote:
| Classic example is emergency services.
|
| Having the ability to turn your location into three words
| that will easily survive communication over a phone with
| dodge signal is very useful.
|
| You could argue that that lat/lon or a street address
| should be fine. But memorising a two sequences of numbers,
| then repeating them accurately over a poor phone line is
| hard.
|
| Street addresses are also hard, there's frequently not a
| nearby road sign, or worse, the road name is ambiguous
| (your city may have multiple streets with the same name).
| Hell there's no guarantee that the emergency services even
| have your street name in their database if it's a new
| street, or it's name was changed recently.
|
| So basically any scenario where you need to transmit a
| location accurately between two parties who are operating
| two different mapping systems, and communicating over an
| unreliable comms link (phone, radio etc), is a good use
| case for W3W. W3W is like the phonetic alphabet for
| locations.
|
| Personally I hate the fact the W3W are extracting rents
| from this services. But I can't deny the utility of their
| service.
| tobr wrote:
| That's honestly incredibly far-fetched. I need to have a
| GPS and a device that is able to do the conversion from
| lat/long to words. Given that prerequisite there are
| about a dozen better ways to solve the issue. Both me and
| the emergency services in the area need to know what
| these word codes are, or we're spending time explaining
| that in an emergency situation. The ability to use it
| offline is nice but assumes that I prepared for that
| ahead of time.
|
| Not to mention that a 40000 word word list has a lot more
| room for misremembering and mishearing than spelling out
| a sequence of digits. If it had used a word list that was
| designed to be easily recognized by sound, had no plurals
| etc, that would have been a different thing.
|
| Also, emergency services are local, but this system
| wastes bandwidth on being able to describe any location
| in the world.
| cybergibbons wrote:
| Why 3 words? Why not 4?
| aembleton wrote:
| Because it is enough to provide sufficient accuracy.
| detaro wrote:
| Why not 4 words and a smaller, less error-prone word
| list?
| cybergibbons wrote:
| Only with a ridiculously long word list containing
| plurals and words people can't spell.
| jhgb wrote:
| > https://what3emojis.com/ is probably the most long-lived
|
| What's the spatial resolution of that? Seems to be dozens of
| meters at best.
| SahAssar wrote:
| The about page says 4m, but I could drag their example map
| over multiple blocks in my city without the emojis changing.
| jhgb wrote:
| That's exactly the thing I noticed, too.
| Twisell wrote:
| The fundamental flaw for me goes deeper.
|
| Both services mimic the principle of URL shortener applied to
| geographic location. (Even if, as you point out, one is public
| domain machine readable and the other is proprietary human
| readable one).
|
| But why are url shortener so popular in the first place? Why
| are they perfectly usable even if competing services exits?
| (and I'd bet most popular are self-generated like
| youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ).
|
| I think they are popular mainly because they rely on the
| ubiquitous HTTP protocol to be fully interoperable with almost
| any HTTP client.
|
| There is no such universal protocol or library to manage
| geospatial data provided in "custom hashed format". But all of
| the various tools available will gladly accept a
| latitude/longitude XY coordinate pair because they are
| perfectly machine readable and while not human friendly they
| actually mean something so that professionals can make sense of
| the numbers if needed. Also as far as variable precision is
| needed, let's throw a round(,) function and be set with it.
|
| So as of now both solution are essentially some kind of private
| API with no widely available and stadardised support to revert
| to a usable latitude/longitude. So I would guess many GIS power
| users look at this suspiciously secretly hoping that no one
| will ever share such obfuscated data format to them for any
| critical use.
|
| NB : For more complex data representations there is a whole
| standard defining organisation https://www.ogc.org that define
| horribly complex (yet useful) data structures and gladly make
| the standard freely and publicly available. Maybe they could
| enforce a flavor of geohash into a FOSS standard so that
| tooling could refer to it, but I'm not sure it's on their
| roadmap.
| jokoon wrote:
| Yes, geohash makes more sense, letter numbers are better, since
| people would still have to memorize words, which is a little
| similar with letters. They would still write it down or copy
| paste it.
|
| Another solution would be a smaller set of easier words, on
| subgrids like geohash, because gradual precision is really
| better.
| lbbb wrote:
| Other similar implementations were either DMCA'd off of various
| platforms or had their domains seized by lawyers, their legal
| actions go back a few years already
|
| I suppose the emoji version survives because it doesn't
| infringe on their word list or patent, which specifically is
| for "words"
| rburhum wrote:
| Hi Nelson, maybe you can explain this to me: why so much hate
| towards what3words? Chris once came to our office to see if
| there was a fit for us to use their invention. We did not find
| that it solved a pain point for us, so nothing came out of
| it... but the amount of rage that I see that they have been
| accumulating towards the years. Is there a story behind it
| beyond "I want to do something similar and can implement it,
| but <patent>?" Thanks in advance
| myself248 wrote:
| Furthermore, there's a payola scheme behind the scenes, to
| make sure automakers implement it in their infotainment
| systems and stuff, which they hope will force others to
| license it.
|
| It's a great idea, a mediocre implementation, and a set of
| business practices that make the antichrist jealous.
|
| On top of that, their bloodthirsty pursuit of any criticism
| means that legitimate discussions of the system's flaws can't
| happen in the open. The lack of that criticism may have
| encouraged some services to adopt W3W without realizing its
| flaws, and there's already some hinting that such a flaw may
| have already interfered with actual rescue operations:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56901363
|
| Thankfully the rescue was able to proceed once they switched
| to another coordinate system, and that case didn't result in
| a fatality. How many other such cases are there? We might
| never know. The company may have literal blood on its hands
| at this point, but fixing the flaws would require discussing
| them first, which we can't do as long as they're empowered to
| shut down discourse.
| wwalexander wrote:
| A standard for global addressing should not rely on a
| proprietary algorithm or wordlist, as it means that there is
| no legal method for using the standard besides using (paying
| for) What3Words' API. This fits the common definition of
| rent-seeking behavior.
|
| This couples with the technological issues outlined in the
| article above. I believe the vitriol against W3W is fueled by
| the combination of rent-seeking behavior on a standard of
| poor technical quality.
|
| I'm also bothered that one of the main use cases W3W's
| marketing highlights is for specifying locations in
| emergencies, a totally non-commercial/public-good
| application. W3W presents itself convincingly to laymen as
| this sort of public-good open standard, but they're just
| another startup with a proprietary product they're hoping to
| monopolize.
| jedberg wrote:
| The hate is _because_ they patented it. It is a useful idea,
| but it would be far more useful if the algorithm and wordlist
| were public domain and didn 't require a license to use it.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| W3W has sent a legal threat to a security researcher[1][2]
| for tweeting about and sharing the open-source software
| alternative WhatFreeWords. Great way to make friends!
|
| and here[3] is a long article of why w3w isn't safe for the
| use-cases they're peddling.
|
| tl;dr: they're a garbage company, with a garbage product, run
| by ghouls.
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/30/what3words-legal-
| threat-wh...
|
| [2]
| https://twitter.com/AaronToponce/status/1387933438305394690
|
| [3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what3words-confusion-
| suitable...
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Hi Ragi! My complaint with What3Words is 85% their
| proprietary business model. They are literally trying to
| convince less developed countries to adopt their system in
| lieu of developing their own addressing systems. So that
| What3Words can forever force that country and anyone sending
| mail to it to pay them fees. It is evil.
|
| This is not theoretical; back in 2017 they were bragging at
| how they'd convinced the nations of Kiribati, Mongolia, Sint-
| Maarten, Cote d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Tonga, Nigeria and the
| Solomon Islands to use them as a national standard. I'm
| certain that the actual usage is exaggerated on their part
| but imagine if it were really true. Addressing is far too
| important to be held by a proprietary company. Addressing is
| a national service that countries should provide as part of
| being a nation, and there's a long history of countries
| developing addressing systems that does not rely on some
| predatory intellectual property system.
|
| 5% of my annoyance is What3Words pretends like they invented
| some brilliant new idea that's unique and should be IP
| protected. No, the idea is older than them. And the
| implementation is obvious to anyone with ordinary skill in
| the art of addressing. Anyone competent with GIS concepts can
| design a similar system in a few days' work. And there are
| many better alternatives.
|
| The other 10% of my complaint is their static addressing
| model. It's not good that two houses nearby have completely
| different addresses; real addressing always has hierarchical
| names and there's a reason for that. There's also a problem
| using words in that they are localized to the country's
| language. That's better than forcing English everywhere but
| makes interoperability way more confusing. Finally there's
| all the problems people keep finding with their word lists;
| that's covered well by other writers so I won't go into it.
|
| PS: I misspoke when I said Geohash is the oldest similar
| system. MGRS dates to the 1940s. There may be older ones,
| too.
| pbronez wrote:
| Skip What3Words, use Placekey: https://www.placekey.io/
|
| It's a better identifier and a much friendlier organization.
| Technical details here:
| https://docs.placekey.io/Placekey_Technical_White_Paper.pdf
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Placekey identifier is hard to remember and read.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Is that another proprietary algorithm?
| rocky1138 wrote:
| Slick site, but I'm not able to use it as I'm not in the USA.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Placekey seems neat, but it only fully supports the USA and
| partially supports the Netherlands.
| ape4 wrote:
| lol it says "universal"
| hyko wrote:
| A proprietary geocode solution remains a _terrible_ idea in
| general, and especially in this case.
|
| The government should buy them, close them, and invest in
| replacing the system with an open and international standard.
| contravariant wrote:
| Can't say I'm fond of their '///word1.word2.word3' notation. Why
| couldn't they just use a URI scheme?
| datfrojo wrote:
| To me that's clear. Firstly most of their target audience has
| no knowledge of what a URI scheme is and only care about the
| three words. Secondly would be the branding ///x.y.z is
| subjectively better branding then w3w://x.y.z
| contravariant wrote:
| I must admit that I don't really care much for how marketable
| their notation is.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Their whole "business model" (in quotes because thankfully
| it doesn't seem to be anywhere near profitable) is to
| convince naive people that they're the good guys helping
| emergency services locate people, that their system is
| flawless and that they're the first to solve this "problem"
| so they can then rent-seek from GPS/mapping developers once
| enough idiots swear by this system and start demanding it
| as a feature.
| naambread wrote:
| I remember this guy way back from alt.ph.uk, he was always doing
| quality posts back then. A brilliant fellow. Great to see another
| excellent write-up from him.
| cybergibbons wrote:
| Old skool! Those were the days :)
| [deleted]
| sneak wrote:
| Note that this company believes this algorithm to be proprietary,
| and seem to have threatened people publishing information about
| it.
|
| I avoid using or publicizing it for that reason.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Geohash can give an accuracy of 0.019 KM at 8 characters, with
| each additional character reducing error by nearly 1 or half an
| order of magnitude and uses just 32 characters.
|
| Why not just map geohash to words? 32^9 << 40000^3, or if you
| want higher accuracy, 32^12 << 40000^4.
|
| The mapping is very simple, 32^3 < 40000, map 32^3 to words and
| back, then split geohash to 3 character long chunks, look them up
| and combine them. Going back is equally trivial.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The "words for location" thing is kind of a non goal anyway.
| They aren't good addresses, which benefit from following
| patterns and being predictable, so the use case is for
| communicating a location.
|
| It really only makes sense if you have an electronic device
| that implements the algorithm and a communications channel that
| only works for voice. Otherwise a beacon sent as data makes
| more sense, and that can be the coordinates directly.
| carstenhag wrote:
| In some places (even in "first-world" countries like Spain,
| my own experience) postal services, the police and visitors
| don't have a clue where your house is located at.
|
| I'd pay 0,50EUR per delivery if amazon.es would allow me to
| specify a what3word-address and have UPS/DHL/etc use it. For
| years the drivers have been calling us, asking where the
| address ist at...
|
| Also really fun when there were burglars in your house and
| the police doesn't know where to drive to.
| detaro wrote:
| But as parent says, for that use case, the word-ness isn't
| relevant - picking coordinates of a map or any of the other
| position encodings would work just as well. And not require
| paying W3W license fees for no good reason.
| maxerickson wrote:
| In the US we bit the bullet and regularized addresses (to
| the county level, which is typically the biggest entity
| providing urgent emergency services).
|
| A rural place I used to live formerly had a named road,
| that got switched to a number that roughly locates it east
| to west in the county, and then the house number was set to
| roughly give the distance north from the nearest crossroad
| to the south. So anyone that understands the addressing
| system in the county can basically drive directly to any
| address without any further information (with perhaps a few
| short detours where roads don't continue or the like).
|
| Of course this works much better in a place that has
| relatively new properly lines that were drawn based on a
| regular survey, but I'd think there would be some momentum
| to at least make things simpler over time.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| If you abandon the requirement to completely replace the existing
| systems you can have a much smaller wordlist. For example, if we
| trust people to know what county they are in we could have
| duplicate triples in each country. Arguably we could go even
| smaller, to the national subdivision (eg state) level
| ehsankia wrote:
| Isn't that what... zip codes/postal codes are? The whole point
| of systems like this is to be able to point to any place on
| earth.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| The point is to easily uniquely identify a point. I'm arguing
| the tuple (California, some, simple, words) solves for that
| use case better than (cromulently, extraneous, uniquely).
| We're (I hope) not doing this just to be different but
| because it has useful new properties. For example, street
| address + zip isn't ideal when you're talking to Search and
| Rescue.
|
| Edit: You can think of this like 9 square meter resolution
| zip codes with a human friendly representation, yes.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Fair enough. That being said, I think PlusCodes are
| basically the better worldwide "zipcodes", and while they
| don't have the "three simple words" property, they do have
| the property you speak of.
|
| You can basically truncate the first 4 character of the 8
| character chunk if you specify a city/country that's within
| one block. You can also add arbitrary precision after the +
| sign by adding more sub-blocks.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| That does sound great. I'll look into it.
| qsort wrote:
| Is there any reason why they didn't use a simple hashing
| algorithm? At first sight it seems to me like they are just
| trying to invent one, but without actually knowing how.
| cybergibbons wrote:
| Two reasons: 1. It needs to be reversible so you can go from
| words to lat/lon. 2. They wanted to use shorter words in
| cities, so the distribution of low n didn't want to cover the
| full range of m. (this could probably be solved by some sort of
| banding though).
| michaelt wrote:
| They have to do that if they want to ensure locations near one
| another never share two of the three words, due to the birthday
| paradox.
|
| Given their 9-square-meter locations and their urban area word
| list of 2500 words, if you assigned the mapping randomly then
| within London you'd expect there to be about 70,000 locations
| with another location sharing two words within 50m.
|
| To put it another way, there would be a 13% chance of a soccer
| pitch containing two locations that shared two words.
| maxerickson wrote:
| They wanted it to be proprietary.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| is the problem just that they treat plural and singular words
| differently? Wouldn't just removing plurals, homophones, and
| difficult to spell words get rid of most of these problems?
| input_sh wrote:
| Yes, mostly if you try to use voice recognition though.
| Example: arrows vs arose, picture vs pitcher etc.
| https://mobile.twitter.com/cybergibbons/status/1388416763549...
| cybergibbons wrote:
| You would still get high densities of cells which share two
| words being present close together, leading to any issue with
| the third word causing a confusing location.
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