FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative

Re:FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative by kybernetikos on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @07:53PM (#31830485)

Yeah, I agree. I think that what3words hasn't spent enough effort on this, or perhaps is suffering from trying to cram everywhere into 3 words, which means the wordlist needs to be unmanageably large.

Even for my attempt at the problem, I did various experiments on the word list, but an ideal attempt would check for similarity across common accents, etc and I certainly wasn't able to do that.

Having said that, I think it's a valid and realistic goal for good word encoder systems to aim for good roundtripability via voice or memory.

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Re:FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative by regularfry on Wednesday June 22, 2022 @03:52AM (#31833153)

The problem with any system like this is that for it to be useful you can't change it after its launched. Any problems with the word list or location allocation are permanently baked in.

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Re:FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative by kybernetikos on Wednesday June 22, 2022 @04:23AM (#31833348)

That's not necessarily true. You can make sure your decoding system understands both the new wordlist and the old wordlist but only gives you new encodings based on the new wordlist.

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