What3words divides the world into squares, each with a unique three-word address

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-49319760

by JonoBB • 7 years ago

19 57 7 years ago

bbc.co.uk

mruts• 7 years ago

Uhh, okay. This is already a solved problem, it’s called GPS. I can see this would be useful as an address system, but using it for the police to find you? Doesn’t make much sense.

Piskvorrr14• 7 years ago

This is based on GPS. The three words are a hash of the coordinates; this seems more user-friendly and less error-prone than "14.1234567,50.35466, wait, no, 50.53466, or is it -50.53466,14.1234567?".

As opposed to e.g. the Maidenhead locator, this has the properties of a hash - in other words, isn't trivially reversible, and you need the w3w company to provide you with the location, each and every time (jackpot!).

Freak_NL2• 7 years ago

"14.1234567,50.35466, wait, no, 50.53466, or is it -50.53466,14.1234567?".

All of which are fine for someone lost in X mountain range. The operator on the other side will know whether -50.* or 14.* is latitude or longitude.

Also, you would just read the numbers from your screen, no ambiguity there.

IshKebab• 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure long-pressing your location in Google Maps and reading out two numbers is a fair bit easier than downloading a new app that you've never heard of.

julienreszka2• 7 years ago

It's faster to read than long lat and it probably uses gps. The innovation is in the user friendly hash table of Geo locations

pgeorgi3• 7 years ago

And apparently it has to feed 100 employees (what are they even doing?)

I doubt that's true for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code and so I'd be less concerned about incentives changing over time (also, it doesn't need a central maintainer for the hash map).

j_4• 7 years ago

"You can build such a system quite trivially", etc. Turning a long numeric sequence into a memorable phrase easy to input with both text and speech solves a real problem.

mfontani• 7 years ago

Oh dear...

* earthquakes and the like _shift locations_ on the crust. The "w3w" address you had for your house isn't at that "w3w" address anymore since that last big quake. Reprint stationery?

* no translation between the English w3w and the Spanish, French, Italian, what-have-you. They're different words altogether. No back and forth.

* It's not open

* if one needs a DATA CONNECTION to find out their current w3w address, they can damn well find the GPS coordinates, too. As a bonus, they don't need a data connection to do that...

vinay4273• 7 years ago

Also, it's not hierarchical with most and least significant words, so changing any of the words would send you some indefinite distance from where you're trying to go.

Open Location Codes (in Google Maps, for instance) seem to solve all of these problems except for not having arguably memorable words. It also doesn't change in line with earthquakes or other shifts, though I would argue that's a benefit more than a drawback.

You can even omit the first few most significant digits by listing the municipality (where those exist) making it somewhat compatible with existing political divisions.

In places with poor addressing, I regularly have to send Google Maps location links, and this provides an open alternative that can be easily transferred onto paper or spoken through a telephone.

Piskvorrr14• 7 years ago

That's a feature, IMNSHO. "I'm in the general vicinity of Wherever, Midsommer, UK, my code is horse.battery.staple" checks out, whereas "battery.horse.staple" is supposed to be halfway around the world, and thus unlikely to get confused.

Piskvorrr14• 7 years ago

That move "let's have a disparate set of dictionaries that don't map to each other" is especially confusing.

silvester23• 7 years ago

* if one needs a DATA CONNECTION to find out their current w3w address, they can damn well find the GPS coordinates

Not arguing your other points (in fact, I agree), but if you have the app installed on your phone, you do not need a data connection to find your current w3w address.

kingosticks2• 7 years ago

It's also a lot easier to remember (and verbally communicate) 3 words than long/latitude. If I'd just legged it down a mountain to tell the police where my injured friends are I'd have a low chance recalling the numbers (assuming I wasn't able to write it down for some reason).

dtf2• 7 years ago

I agree with these points, and yet:

"Humberside Police also used the system to find a group of foreign nationals, including a pregnant woman in labour, who were trapped inside a shipping container at a port.

The port had over 20,000 containers and we knew that we needed to get to them quickly," said the force's control room supervisor Paul Redshaw.

The group were told to download the app and they were soon found.

There is no doubt in my mind that these incidents could have had very different outcomes had we not been able to use what3words," Mr Redshaw said."

The emergency services see something very useful here. Is there a better way to do it? Lat/Lon numbers just don't cut it.

Piskvorrr14• 7 years ago

If that's an actual story and not PR. What I see: a full-metal enclosure AKA shipping container, and yet a GPS fix is obtained? Pull the other one.

sho2• 7 years ago

I have a lot of trouble believing that story.

timthorn• 7 years ago

Grid refs do a good job in the UK. Two letters (which can be omitted if you know roughly where you are) and 6 digits get you to a 100m square, 8 digits to 10m and so on. That's the system the police use as the base truth, and any other system - what3words or Lat/Long - will be converted to OS grid refs with some loss of accuracy due to different projection models.

Maps show the grid as an overlay every 1km so the position is easy to read.

eythian• 7 years ago

* earthquakes shifting you a meter or so are a really big deal, reprinting stationery would be low on the scale of things you're caring about.

* translations so often don't work in a one-to-one fashion, it'd be risky to expect them to do so.

* this is a big deal.

* had you read the article, it specifically explains that you don't need a data connection to determine the address. Also, GPS coordinates are a terrible way to pass locations between humans, numbers are easy to transpose, mess up, forget.

Piskvorrr14• 7 years ago

Re translations: Sure. But is the expectation "I'm passing a set of words, of course it doesn't translate", or "I'm passing a location, of course it's the same location regardless of language"? (IDK)

furi• 7 years ago

translations so often don't work in a one-to-one fashion, it'd be risky to expect them to do so.

That's hardly a point in What3Words' favor. They dragged words into it where previously there were only numbers so now they're responsible for finding a solution to the problem of words' cultural specificity. I don't think "our coordinates contain zero information that crosses linguistic boundaries" is a good solution to that problem.

Freak_NL2• 7 years ago

Just a proprietary algorithm looking for public problems it can claim to solve. Oppose it or just ignore it. There are open solutions that do similar things.

See previous discussions on HN for more background. Their one success story is how they managed to get the Mongolian postal services to adopt their tool.

Can you imagine someone lost on a mountain side telling the emergency operator that he is located at 'snake.apple.dimwit' and getting asked to please just give coordinates or even a rough idea of where you might be in terms of local names, because the What3Wordsⓒ database is down?

another-dave• 7 years ago

Oppose it or just ignore it. There are open solutions that do similar things.

I think now is the time to oppose it rather than ignore it.

I agree in principle re: open source solutions, but if you're stuck in a forest in County Durham, as per the article, and the police say "download this app and give us the 3 words for your location", you can't get into a discussion about how it would be better to use an open standard and not a proprietary solution :)

What I mean is, this is already gaining traction so ignoring feels like it just cedes the ground to it as a closed platform — to me it seems similar to Facebook et al: early days, you decide to ignore it as a closed platform, but because of network effects it's now much more difficult to try and get everyone to move to something like Mastodon.

If police forces and postal services are starting to integrate this into their workflows, now's the time to try and push the discussion to the open source alternatives and raise the problems of this — it's disappointing that the BBC article reads like a press release rather than any attempt at critical analysis. With pseudo-science they'll do "balanced reporting" and give the other side but here no counter argument!

why-oh-why• 7 years ago

How many times is this gonna be posted? It’s basically spam at this point. Don’t use proprietary solutions to already-freely-solved problems

mosselman2• 7 years ago

What free solution is there that does this?

Piskvorrr14• 7 years ago

Oh, this is free-as-in-beer all right (at the time of writing). Free-as-in-speech would be, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code

Or even the venerable Maidenhead Locator, even though it's not well specified for high location precision.

londons_explore2• 7 years ago

They have VC funding and a big PR team... They're probably going to win by paying big companies like Facebook to promote what3words usage with the public.

andylynch• 7 years ago

This got me thinking- even though we now have Advanced Mobile Location rolling out in the EU, UK, and US, it would be a win if your phone could show your location (grid reference/lat long) when making an emergency call - AML will pick this up and send it automatically, but this could be a good fallback and timesaver.

FartyMcFarter• 7 years ago

Have operators implemented things like Android ELS?

https://crisisresponse.google/emergencylocationservice/how-i...

stefco_• 7 years ago

Others have pointed out many weaknesses of this product already, but one seemingly annoying issue is homophones in the context of verbally communicating your location. They use a 40k word dictionary; surely there are tons of homophones in there. And there are surely more homophones outside the dictionary (which would just give an error when queried through their API).

When you call some delivery service and ask them to find you at course.serial.flower, they could end up querying one of:

  - coarse.serial.flower
  - course.cereal.flower
  - course.serial.flour
  - coarse.cereal.flower
  - coarse.serial.flour
  - course.cereal.flour
  - coarse.cereal.flour

If these homophones are used in the dictionary, the other person will get an effectively random location on earth. If the homophones are not in the dictionary, they will get no result from the API.

In practice, you'll either need to be extra careful about specifying locations this way, or you'll need to provide extra location data like zip/city/etc. as error-correcting code. But at that point, it seems like you're not much better off than you would be with conventional addresses or LAT/LON coordinates for common use cases.

londons_explore2• 7 years ago

I think they've filtered most of these, or at least pushed them out of populated areas and into the middle of oceans.

chrischen• 7 years ago

So one of the main criticisms is that there is no need for this to be a proprietary thing rather than an open standard. So, why hasn't someone made an open DB of 3 words?

Piskvorrr14• 7 years ago

Stuff like that exists - Google's Plus Codes, the old and reliable Maidenhead Locator system, etc. The business model here seems to be "we need to market the system aggressively (see article) - if we make the system open, we can no longer profit from it".

In other words, an open system will IMHO languish in obscurity due to lack of marketing funding.

pepper_sauce• 7 years ago

The UK already has a well known system of coordinates called the British National Grid (BNG). You'd be hard pressed to find a map printed in the last ~80 years that doesn't have BNG coordinates in it.

Replacing it with a new proprietary, closed system that can only be accessed from app is a terrible idea.

newsbinator• 7 years ago

I'm concerned that I selected English (US) as my language, whereas English (UK) might have a completely different set of words.

Emergency services would have to be using the same flavor of English as the victim.

tomhoward• 7 years ago

Discussed on HN when launched 5 years ago...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198

reustle• 7 years ago

Reposting my comment from the duplicate earlier:

Reminder that you should avoid what3words. Still unfortunate that some governments fell into using them.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-....

The algorithm used to generate the words is proprietary. You are not allowed to see it. You cannot find out your location without asking W3W for permission.
If you want permission, you have to agree to some pretty long terms and conditions. And understand their privacy policy. Oh, and an API agreement. And then make sure you don't infringe their patents.
You cannot store locations. You have to let them analyse the locations you look up. Want to use more than 10,000 addresses? Contact them for prices!

nathanaldensr• 7 years ago

This company is still around? Amazing.

jlawson• 7 years ago

A lot of people seem to be down on this, citing GPS and other traditional numeric systems.

But I think this is much better for police specifically. For reasons that are not about data or systems so much as physical practicality.

Consider circumstances like these: A panicked hairdresser lost in the forest. An old person with progressing dementia; forgot where they were. A kidnapped child trapped in a room or locked in a car. Anyone in a burning building who can smell smoke. Try any of these situations when the cellphone is at 5%, or when the call keeps dropping, or when you can barely hear because it's so loud, or barely see, or you're drunk, your hand is broken, you're on drugs, you're dehydrated, you're hypothermic, you're bleeding, you're surrounded by buzzing insects...

Now think about the physical practicalities of a numbers system like GPS. To use any numerical system, you're talking about memorizing a string of eight or ten digits off one app and then reading them into a phone call. Yes, it may be possible to go on speaker and minimize the call app (if nobody is hunting you) but lots of people can't figure that out on their best day, much less in life-threatening situations. You have to be able to memorize it when you're afraid of death or shivering in the cold outside. Maybe the call gets disconnected and you have to go back, oh shit I closed the app, what was the number, oh I mixed up some numbers near the end, oh my god....

Almost anyone can remember three words without trying. A child can do it and my grandma can do it. Even if you get disconnected, it won't be hard to remember the words even minutes later. You can't miss a number, you can't transpose the numbers by accident because if you make a mistake it'll be obvious since the words aren't adjacent in the grid (for this reason). It's incredibly practical for the physical and mental constraints of a police situation, and that's why they use it.

What3words divides the world into squares, each with a unique three-word address

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