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What3words (1 Viewer)

There does seem to be a problem with their word choices.

ship.wreck.shipwreck is in northern Norway.

shipwreck.ship.wreck is in Alaska
 
There is often a happy medium.
UK motorway junctions are in numerical order, but you get no idea of how far the next junction is.
Some countries use the km posts for naming the junction so you know how far away it is.

Wonder if what three words could have been arranged alphabetically! So you knew ship.wrecked.shipwreck is very close to shipwrecked.ship.wreck! And that way you could have made use of ship.wrecked.. I e. What2words! For a slightly less accurate position.

Too late now though!
 
Saw that article this morning - presumably what4words, getting rid of all plurals, synonyms, unusal/archaic words and other possible confusions would effectively solve it ... the technology and platform are already there and proven ...

Another thought - just how precise does it actually have to be? 3m or whatever it is should be far more precise than ever required in almost any circumstances - clean it up and what3words to a 10 by 10 or 30 by 30m square would solve?
 
Saw that article this morning - presumably what4words, getting rid of all plurals, synonyms, unusal/archaic words and other possible confusions would effectively solve it ... the technology and platform are already there and proven ...

Another thought - just how precise does it actually have to be? 3m or whatever it is should be far more precise than ever required in almost any circumstances - clean it up and what3words to a 10 by 10 or 30 by 30m square would solve?
That's what I thought.. what 2 words! 50m2
 
Hi Mono,

There does seem to be a problem with their word choices.

ship.wreck.shipwreck is in northern Norway.

shipwreck.ship.wreck is in Alaska

Well, that's not so bad since often you know from the context which country a location is supposed to be on, it's an easily recognizable and potentially even a correctible mistake.

It's when the confusable names point to locations located in closer proximity to each other than the system fails.

Relevant quotes from the linked article:

[Andrew Tierney] found that the algorithm behind W3W often gave similar-sounding words and plural versions of words for locations in close proximity, which could cause confusion.

So, for example, circle.goal.leader and circle.goals.leader are less than 1.2 miles (2km) apart along the River Thames.

In response to the latest finding, Mr Tierney told the BBC: "This is not an algorithm issue. Something like 73% of What3Words addresses contain a word that can be changed just by adding or removing a letter."

That's the same problem I pointed out earlier in this thread for German location names, though of course Andrew Tierney systematically evaluated the issue and quantified the problem.

If the majority of the W3W words are within a single-letter difference to another valid W3W word ... well, someone seems to have missed computer science 101.

Just for groans, here's a 1950 paper on the topic ... R.W. Hamming - Error Detecting and Error Correcting Codes (1/15) ..., stating:

Examples of codes which were designed to detect isolated errors are numerous

I sort of wonder how it was possible that W3W didn't catch that problem in the earliest of project phases ...

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)
 
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