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cybergibbons | 4 years ago

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.

discuss

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pmoriarty|4 years ago

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

jeroenhd|4 years ago

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.

vonuebelgarten|4 years ago

The sad part is that this problem was solved decades ago with grid locators like Maidenhead[1]. It's a purely mathematical conversions with no lookup tables, cover the entire world and alternate pairs of letters with pairs of digits (so no confusing or language and culture dependent words).

Code becomes longer according to the required precision, so eight digits are enough for a typical city neighborhood, ten digits goes to a 30x20m block that is good for disambiguation even in the most dense urban areas. Adding more digits will work too, but that just more work.

A typical location would be something like: fm19oc75hv

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System

flir|4 years ago

> 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.

fpig|4 years ago

I don't disagree, but not sure why you associate poor spelling with non-native speakers.

jfrunyon|4 years ago

Bingo. Either more words, or fewer grid squares (f.e. instead of 3x3m grid, a 4x4m grid). I truly don't understand why they thought they needed 3m (10ft) of precision: my home has something like 10 What3Words addresses (80 if you count the yard and the other side of the duplex!). The old outhouse at the family ranch has more than one!

IMO, they also should have built redundancy (some form of error checking at least) into the encoding.

noir_lord|4 years ago

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.

kybernetikos|4 years ago

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|4 years ago

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.

ehsankia|4 years ago

> 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|4 years ago

It's promoted for use in search and rescue, so other bands are in use.