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A comment on What3Words – The Algorithm. Parent comment

Re:What3Words – The Algorithm by tobr on Sunday May 02, 2021 @04:59PM (#27018953)
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.

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Re:What3Words – The Algorithm by anticensor on Monday May 03, 2021 @05:43AM (#27023173)
> 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.

Not only that, the word list is localised in different languages, and those are untranslatable as each locale uses a different coefficient table.

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