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Re:What3words, the GPS app that can find anyone anywhere by lifthrasiir on Friday June 29, 2018 @05:35AM (#17423450)
Moreover it is absolutely not locality sensitive, rendering the whole system into a proprietary hashing algorithm. Probably the localization is pretty much the only element I agree to be good to have, but I believe it's likely that some word pairs are in the same synset for some languages, even though I'm not really in a position to evaluate its wordlists.
Re:What3words, the GPS app that can find anyone anywhere by Findus23 on Friday June 29, 2018 @05:45AM (#17423491)
I'm not sure I understand their idea of localization.

The center of Vienna is "decays.jump.graver" (if those are simple words is questionable).

But when I switch to German the same block becomes "fahrende.hügeligen.ansprüche" (driving, hilly, demands). So the words I get by default are again just random strings for someone who doesn't speak German)

And even someone who speaks German may get the inflection of the words wrong and end up in "fahren.hügelig.ansprüche", "fahrend.hügelige.ansprüche" or any other permutation of the many ways the same word could be written in another context.

And worst of all, all those permutations exist and map to other locations somewhere on earth.

Re:What3words, the GPS app that can find anyone anywhere by lifthrasiir on Friday June 29, 2018 @05:53AM (#17423521)
You are correct, it's a horrible implementation of an otherwise good idea.

Personally I want a public domain list of 2^k distinct words of distinct and unambiguous enough meanings, that are then translated to many other languages and evaluated for the same criteria (in reality, such system will be required to begin with as many languages as possible). My best guess is that k=10 is possible with a lot of efforts.

Re:What3words, the GPS app that can find anyone anywhere by seszett on Friday June 29, 2018 @05:59AM (#17423544)
> And worst of all, all those permutations exist and map to other locations somewhere on earth.

To be honest they did give a thought about this, as apparently close sounding words are supposed to map to places that are far apart.

It makes sense, as you should at least know if you're looking for a place in Austria or Burkina-Faso, but it also means that if you heard the words wrong then you depend on their algorithm to find a slightly different-sounding address that is the one you were looking for, instead of a more intuitive system where you could just around because if it sounded the same then it should be closer.

And since the word list is proprietary, you really entirely depend on them. Their website shows three different suggestions, the one you typed and two close sounding ones.

Tough luck if you typed "duper.listons.égalisons" and the actual address was "duper.listons.égalisation", you won't get it in the suggestions.