Providing Addresses for 4 Billion People Using Three Words (mondaynote.com)

HughPickens.com writes: 75% of the Earth's population, i.e. four billion people, effectively "don't exist" to modern computer systems because they have no physical address. The "unaddressed" can't open a bank account, can't deal properly with a hospital or an administration, and can even struggle to get a delivery. Now Frédéric Filloux writes at Monday Note that What3Words, a London startup, is seeking to solve this problem by providing a combination of three words, in any language, that specify every 3-meter by 3-meter square in the world. Each square has a 3-word address that can be communicated quickly, easily and with no ambiguity. Altogether, 40,000 words combined in triplets label 57 trillion squares. Thus far, the system has been built in 10 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Swahili, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish and, starting next month, Arabic. All together, this lingua franca requires only 5 megabytes of data, small enough to reside in any smartphone and work offline. Each square has its identity in its own language that is not a translation of another.

Messy addressing systems have measurable consequences. UPS, the world's largest parcel delivery provider, calculated that if its trucks merely drove one mile less per day, the company would save $50m a year. In United Kingdom, bad addressing costs the Royal Mail £775m per year. "One might say latitude and longitude can solve this. Sure thing. Except that GPS coordinates require 16 digits, 2 characters (+/-/N/S/E/W), 2 decimal points, space and comma, to specify a location of the size of a housing block," writes Filloux. "Not helpful for a densely populated African village, or a Mumbai slum." The system is already being used to deliver packages in the favelas in Brasil with Cartero Amigo, solar lights to the Slums in India with Pollinate-Energy and mosquito traps in Tanzania with in2care. For What3Words, the decisive boost will come from its integration in major mapping suppliers such as Google Maps or Waze.

Comments

inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

too bad that each letter in each of those three words probably requires (UNICODE) 2 bytes of 4-5 digits worth of numbers PER CHARACTER to store

Re: inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

And GPS takes 13 digits, not 16. If you have to resort to embellishment, maybe your product isn't all that great?

Re:inefficient

[bunratty]

Inefficient for a computer, but very efficient for a person, who has significant dedicated hardware for language processing. That's why using combinations of words makes a good password for a human to remember, but hard for a computer program to crack. https://xkcd.com/936/

Re:inefficient

[WarJolt]

You're missing the point. Words are easier to remember. IP addresses are often shorter than most domain names, but we still use domain names because they can be easily remembered.

news.slashdot.org uses more characters than the ip address 216.34.181.48. You can even remove the dots in the ip address and save some space. Or better yet you can encode the ip address as hex. Now you have an 8 character string vs an 18 character string. I still prefer news.slashdot.org.

Re:inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

Not when someone in the US has to speak these 3 words to someone whose primary language isn't English.
Words become much harder to comprehend over the phone with someone in India when they are used out of context.

Also, what problem are we trying to solve?
"People without addresses can't open bank accounts"
Well this isn't an address. And people without addresses can't get mail so why would the bank accept this as an alternative.
How could someone ever prove they lived at this 3 word address.

Re:inefficient

[wonkey_monkey]

The point can be found at highway.treble.lemon, and you completely missed it.

Re:inefficient

[MachineShedFred]

The problem being that there appears to be no rhyme nor reason to the three words being used for squares in contiguous space. Use their website to look at a few squares that are all part of the same piece of property - it appears to be completely random.

I'm never going to tell someone that they can find my driveway at 'slope.radioactive.massaging' because they have no fucking clue what that means to anything but this database. Whereas if you tell them some thing like '390 SE Hawthorne St.' they can at least have a clue depending on how the city and addressing scheme works.

Re: inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

You're just mad because your square is Poopy Smelly Fart.

Re:inefficient

[headbulb]

No you can't remove the dots. You can however turn it into a number after doing a little math for each section.

Re:inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

Irrelevant, the computer just converts the words into GPS, stores and handles those, then converts that back to 3words.

Re:inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

Klaatu, Verata, Nickto.

Re:inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

But if this gives them an address, they can get mail.

How can you prove you live at your house address now?
Why would this addressing method be any different?

Re:inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

The point can be found at highway.treble.lemon, and you completely missed it.

Dammit, I went to highway.triple.lemon. Wrong country.

Re: inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

Necktie*

Re:inefficient

[OhPlz]

The phone system in the US started out in a similar way. The exchange was a word based on the three numbers and then the phone number itself was four digits. But it ended up being easier to just use numbers for the whole thing.

Re:inefficient

[OhPlz]

That will happen. I have the same problem with my street address because there are three streets in the same general area that are one character off from each other in spelling and almost identical in pronunciation. Good luck generating these three word combos taking all that into account, and in multiple languages and character sets.

Re:inefficient

[fibonacci8]

"Look, maybe I didn't say every single little tiny syllable, no. But basically I said them, yeah." Also, the developers of EverQuest have their own take on it: http://everquest.allakhazam.co... Check the prompt just before receiving a tattered cloth note.

Re:inefficient

[Phreakiture]

Either one can be proved the same way: Address a piece of mail to it, and then ask me to produce it in person a week or so later. That will suffice to prove that the address can lead content to me. Anything further, that can't be proved about the address, is outside of the scope of an address's purpose.

Re:inefficient

[Sarten-X]

Words are easy for humans to remember, but they're awful for processing, which is why most of the world switched to numbers a long time ago. Many European cities used to use house names when there were only a few hundred houses in the area, then they switched to using street names and numbers when it became too difficult to keep track of everyone's movements.

Using coordinates allows you to estimate distances just by knowing two locations. You can use them for direct-path navigation, as well as (except for extreme latitudes) travel constrained to cardinal directions, as most large cities tend to support. Given a location, you can also know roughly where you're going without the aid of any electronic device, and with some experience, one can get quite skilled at figuring out their location by only dead-reckoning.

This scheme provides what is effectively a hash of each location on the globe. That's wonderfully useful for determining "am I here?", but not very good for figuring out "how do I get there?". To effectively navigate, the three-word addresses must be translated into coordinates anyway, then compared to a graph of potential routes, and a path derived from that. Effectively, it's just an extra step (which requires a computer's help, or a book of lookup tables) for anyone trying to find a particular location.

A more useful scheme would be to divide the world into regions and subregions, using easily-memorized or safely-assumed names. Then divide those large areas into small blocks, and give them numeric addresses, which can be subdivided as necessary to reach any level of precision. For example, the Central City Recreation Center is located in the nation of "United States of America", in the region "Utah", subregion "Salt Lake City", at a grid location of "615 South 300 East". It pretty much covers the area from 600 South 300 East to 640 South 350 East, so if you really needed to specify a particular 9-square-meter room, you have a reasonable way to do it with the existing system. Having only visited Salt Lake City once, I can tell you that it's not too far from City Hall, which is centered around 450 South 150 East.

Re:inefficient

[sehlat]

I'm impressed by the idea, but it won't be fully realized until the language set includes Klingon and Elvish.

Re:inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

Which doesn't exist. I wonder if they deliberately avoid those sort of things, so that random misheard word combinations are unlikely to map to anything.

Anyway, I love one of the blocks that could map to my place: "drones totally toasted" ;) Should totally use that when ordering from Amazon if they allow the system. Delivery instructions: "Come and get some! (*chk!-chk!*)"

Re:inefficient

[JustOK]

First 2 letters, like DEarborn 5-7500

Re:inefficient

[sims 2]

I've always thought QTH locator (aka Maidenhead Locator System) was pretty neat gets you really close with few letters DM26PA13VM is a parking at the hoover dam but if you cut two letters off the end DM26PA13 only gets you to the hoover dam.

A 5MB database shouldn't be a problem considering most gps units have had maps in the 1GB+ range for many years now.

w3w however seems to provide high precision with easy to remember phrases such as "start deflects tuxedos"

And you can turn them into jokes.
Why did microsoft bring back the start menu in windows 10?
Because start deflects tuxedos. Bad-pun pish.

Re:inefficient

[JustOK]

Yes, your system requires an addressing system. They are talking about including places that do not have an addressing system.

Re:inefficient

[Cinnamon Beige]

The problem being that there appears to be no rhyme nor reason to the three words being used for squares in contiguous space. Use their website to look at a few squares that are all part of the same piece of property - it appears to be completely random.

I'm never going to tell someone that they can find my driveway at 'slope.radioactive.massaging' because they have no fucking clue what that means to anything but this database. Whereas if you tell them some thing like '390 SE Hawthorne St.' they can at least have a clue depending on how the city and addressing scheme works.

I think it'd work best as a way to double up your address--for example, UPS absolutely refuses to deliver to my address unless I write it in a 'weird' way because they can't work out how my apartment complex's numbering system works. (This is impressive in all the wrong ways.) Given that some places don't necessarily tell me who they'll ship my packages through, if I can give them both the address in the form the government puts it and a three-word set, I think it's reasonable for me to be rather annoyed with them if they still fail to figure out where I am.

This also might help the nearest pizza delivery place manage to find my apartment on a regular basis, too. No, I've no idea how they manage to inconsistently fail.

I don't really see this as a way to replace street addresses, but rather a way to give two different means for determining your address, in case the !@#$ delivery person cannot locate you--and if designed so all the words work as a phonetic alphabet and you can safely work out what three words are meant if you know it's S*.R*.M* and local, it could possibly be a faster & more robust way to tell Emergency Services where you are.

Re:inefficient

[YrWrstNtmr]

Actually, it was the first 2 characters of the exchange, and a number. I still remember our house phone number from the 60's
DUdley1-7xxx. Morphed into 381-7xxx.

Re:inefficient

[JustOK]

over.whoosh.head

Re:inefficient

[lgw]

If the first word were alphabetical by lattitude, and the second by longitude, and the third very different for nearby squares, this would be a much better system. From the first two words you could get a good general idea where someone was, and the fourth would act as a checksum.

Re:inefficient

[OhPlz]

There were different dialing plans..

"In the United States, the most-populous cities, such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago used telephone numbers consisting of three letters and four digits (3L-4N)" (from wikipedia)

I'm in the Boston area, so this is what came to mind. But yea, yours is another one of the many variations. 3L-4N was a standard before the whole thing was dropped.

Re:inefficient

[lgw]

"Three, sir!"

"Third! Third would act as a checksum!"

Re:inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

err.. 2L-5N was an eventual standard.

Re: inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

ITheir algorithm automatically maps similar sounding words to vastly different areas of the world. If you are looking for an address in New York and your three word combination maps to Ah-So,China , you know something is up.

Re:inefficient

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

DAMMIT! I am at penis.turtle.fatass.

Who thought this shitty system up?

Re:inefficient

[Wycliffe]

You're missing the point. Words are easier to remember.

Words might be easier to remember but their system is broken. They would be better off ordering the words alphabetically and mapping the first word to latitude and the second word to longitude and the third word to a checksum. Instead, what they have is dinosaurs.masks.established is in Minnesota while dinosaur.masks.established is in Missouri so being off by a single trailing 's' changes your location by hundreds of miles.

Re: inefficient

[OhPlz]

Just because they claim it does that doesn't mean that it actually does. Human language is a difficult thing to handle with computer algorithms. Especially when you get into localized dialects that can significantly alter the pronunciations. That's going to be a big problem considering the problem they're trying to solve, areas that civilization hasn't touched yet.

Re:inefficient

[TapeCutter]

Yes the initial choice of the word combination is arbitrary. Having worked on a (massively expensive) project that merged several national address databases, I think this idea is brilliant. Address databases are created for different purposes, eg: council is only interested in property numbers (lot number), post office is only interested in the letterbox (street address), utilities are interested in access points (easements). For a normal house on a normal house lot the data in the different databases refers to the same location, for something like an office inside a football stadium, things get very confusing. When you get down to details, the number of variations as to how people enter an address into a free form text field is mind boggling. The system they propose fits inside a 10mb file, it's easy for humans to remember, easy for computers to manipulate, and would be a vast improvement on what is already our there.

The obvious problem is getting everyone to use it, as they say in their video it would need to be added to services such google maps and integrated into GPS apps. Places like Africa, India, SE Asia, even outback communities here in Oz would benefit greatly.

Re: inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you imagine giving directions?

Drive your car over the redheads.step.child for five miles. Then hang a left at the wife.beating.husband. After 10 minutes you will arrive at the big.honking.woman. If you pass the large.green.neck-beard you have gone too far.

Re:inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. There are maybe 3,000 commonly used words in English, so there are about 81 trillion combinations of 4 words. That's a small enough number that someone using a dictionary search could crack it pretty quickly. You could use esoteric words to up the difficulty by an order of magnitude or two, but that just means days instead of hours to crack your password. If you really want a secure password, your best bet is to be a bad speller. corectwhorsebattrystapl is a MUCH better password and just as easy to remember if that's how you spell those words.

Re:inefficient

[hey!]

too bad that each letter in each of those three words probably requires (UNICODE) 2 bytes of 4-5 digits worth of numbers PER CHARACTER to store

Well, that assumes you use a poorly chosen unicode encoding. In UTF8 you only need one byte per character for these particular strings. In fact you don't need unicode at all; since the words only use lowercase latin alphabet you can store them as just five bits per character.

But even that's a lot more space than you can get away with for storage. You don't need to store the string at all; since the triplets are made up from words selected from a 40,000 word dictionary, you can simply store a three-tuple of indices into that dictionary (x1, x2, x3), where each index takes 16 bits [log2(40,000) < 15.29]. So the total storage you would need for an address is 48 bits, or six bytes, which is less than it would take to store a lat/lon coordinate as a pair of single precision floating point numbers (32 bits each x 2 = 64 bits = 8 bytes)

Re: inefficient

[Rei]

Have you actually verified that this is a real problem? Try punching in any random three words. I just tried 10 combinations, not a single one existed.

I think you're worried about a problem that does not exist. A mishearing is almost certain to lead to no address, not a wrong address, let alone a believable wrong address. In fact, the search space seems to be so significantly larger than the actual space that it should be possible to add suggestions for if a person searches for an address that doesn't exist.

Re:inefficient

[ttucker]

By this system your house probably has hundreds of addresses. This is a vague replacement for GPS coordinates, not for street addresses.

Re:inefficient

[ttucker]

Even latitude/longitude coordinates give you some clue at all about where they are, which is all this system is attempting to crudely replace.

Where is 'correct . battery . staple'?

Is it near 'stupid . coordinate . system'?

Re:inefficient

[ttucker]

How does this system help more than say, the UTM coordinate system?

Re:inefficient

[ttucker]

The obvious problem is getting everyone to use it, as they say in their video it would need to be added to services such google maps and integrated into GPS apps.

Which they plan to charge them money for.

Re:inefficient

[ttucker]

Anyway, I love one of the blocks that could map to my place: "drones totally toasted" ;)

Not that anyone would go to Iceland anyways, but you just gave your physical location to within 4.2 meters on an internet forum.

Re: inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct horse's battery staples.

As you see, it can quickly grow past 81 trillion possibilities.

Re:inefficient

[Guybrush_T]

Inefficient for a computer, but very efficient for a person, who has significant dedicated hardware for language processing.

True.

That's why using combinations of words makes a good password for a human to remember, but hard for a computer program to crack. https://xkcd.com/936/

True and wrong. In this 3word case, those 3 words are completely unrelated (random). Which makes them not so easy to remember, especially because you need a relatively vast dictionary to map the entire earth. For passwords, people will always keep a password where words kind of work together (if you enforce 4 words, then "this is my password" will definitely be the #1). It's hard for computers to know which combinations make more sense than others, but recent advances in machine learning could change that (and also show that stupid password policies currently in use are completely missing the point : length or special characters don't help, the only thing that makes a good password is randomness/unicity to the human mind).

Back to the map, maybe it would be good to improve the word distribution so that combinations making more sense are located in dense areas (and not in the middle of the sea). Or just create a colored map where you can see combinations which make more sense so that you can easily pick one if your place has more than one.

Re:inefficient

[gumbi west]

shhhhhhhhhhh.

Re:inefficient

[WinstonWolfIT]

That's precisely what PayPal does

Re: inefficient

[justthinkit]

Also, does their math add up? "40,000 to the third power worth of word combinations...can be stored in 5 megabytes?" Sounds like they could make a lot more money in the data compression business...

Re:inefficient

[liquidsin]

"stupid.coordinate.system" wasn't found, but "silly.mapping.system" is in northern Texas, between Lubbock and Amarillo.

Re: inefficient

[liquidsin]

from their website: "As it is an algorithm our solution takes up less than 10MB, small enough to install on almost all smartphones and works across platforms and devices."

Re: inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

hey dumbshit, if you're going to be racist, at least get the country right.

Re:inefficient

[Gavagai80]

Now all services will be delivered to the person on the first floor below your apartment because nobody will think about the vertical direction not specified by the three words. Not very helpful.

Re:inefficient

[Gavagai80]

That might be a feature rather than a bug. You're more likely to notice being directed to the wrong state than to notice delivering a block away from where you should.

Re:inefficient

[Cederic]

Your property is over 900 square metres? Nice.

I can pick from 2-3 squares, including my garden, although it's a bit awkward because my neighbour shares a couple of them.

Re:inefficient

[fnj]

If you transform it to hex and leave all leading zeros in, you're darn tootin' you can remove the dots without losing any information.

Re:inefficient

[KGIII]

On my way to find my house (the street address was quite a ways off) I learned that my house is near "agents.educated.account." That's not really *at* my house but it's where the pin was located while I was finding my house in their silly map thing. I'm not sure how to take it. I do think that's technically on property that I own. :/

Re: inefficient

[KGIII]

I was getting directions to a trout stream in the foothills of Maine and one of the directions was, "If you get to the red barn, burned down in what? 1976 Fred? Ayuh, 62 'twas. Well there. If you get to the red barn, burned down in '76, you've gone too far. Turn around and go back 'bout a half mile and look for the path, can't hardly see it, on the right - should have some ferns this time of year."

Eventually, I found a productive stream in that area so I'm assuming it was the right one. It turned out to be a beaver dam and I had brought fly and spin casting equipment in with me so I was happy.

At any rate... I probably would have had better luck with this system. We do have, here in Maine, a road called "Katie's Crotch." I do not know if that's the official name or not.

Re: inefficient

[KGIII]

I got it in the second try.
https://map.what3words.com/fed...

I don't think it's a problem. I just wanted to see if I could find something fun. My first was green.eggs.ham and that was not a location on the map. I was a bit disappointed. Note: I have no idea why they think this will be a problem. I just wanted to see how many tries it would take. I tried a half dozen more, after that, and I found nothing.

Re:inefficient

[KGIII]

Meh... Up thread, I gave an address that is probably on my property. It'd be easy enough to find me anyhow. What? Is some /.er going to come visit me? Well, I'm not home right now but I'll be back in the spring, at the latest. When you're at the door, turn around, look up, in the upper left, reach your hand up on the ledge (no, it's not a mouse-trap) and find the nail. On the nail is a key. Use the key and open the door - it's easier and less expensive than you breaking my stuff. The alarm code is obvious if you know me. Seriously, it's not hard - just think about it and you'll figure it out if you know me at all.

Someone will be by in the morning, there's some food already there and lots of it in the freezer and preserved in the pantry. There's booze in the cabinet - some of it is good. Try to not puke on anything nice. Kindly leave the PCs that are on, on. There's others scattered around, make use of them as you will but don't break anything. I can probably see you and will get a text telling me that the alarm is deactivated. There's one bedroom that is off-limits. It is locked. Everything else is unlocked, make use of it as if it were your own but with slightly more care 'cause it's not.

Don't be alarmed when the neighbor shows up tomorrow. She'll go get you some regular food and probably make you some food. She'll probably have my dog with her. He responds best to Stupid Dog. He's harmless and won't even ride your leg. There are three sets of car keys in the garage. They will allow you to use any of three vehicles. The rest are off limits. Basically, if it is locked or doesn't have a key in an obvious place - you're forbidden from accessing it and I'll be kind of pissed if you do.

There you go. Help yourself and don't trash the place. If you do, it's insured but I'm still gonna be really pissed. There's unprotected guest access to the wireless. The computer should, for the most part, all have a guest account enabled. You can probably find one that automatically logs in. Kindly update them, thanks. The password will be handy, look in a desk drawer for a sticky note. Avoid the basement, if you can. There are some dangerous things down there - mostly locked up. The server closet is locked up so that's off-limits as are my gun safes.

Bring your wife and kids, it's beautiful there - that's why the house is there. The neighbors are cool and quiet - there aren't many. They may call me to see if I know you're there but they won't be too shocked.

This sort of mentality has served me well. I've had less stolen and damaged since I adopted this sort of attitude. And, well, if something happens then that's what insurance is for. So far, so good.

Re:inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, but of course the perfect way to do what you suggest is to provide Lat&Long. The only reason Lat&Long aren't used more widely is because most GPS units seem to hide that information rather than show it, and entering Lat&Long as a destination is usually clumsy to do.

Re:inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

Chtulhu Chtulhu Chtulhu

Re:inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

Ot you could give the address as just.not.reasonable, 3rd floor apt. A

Re:inefficient

[jbengt]

The phone numbers in Chicago were only 6 digits in the 1920s, according to my dad (including the letters for the exchange prefix) Phone numbers in the 60s included two letters and a number for the exchange prefix plus four numbers, as said above. (my prefix was Lake View 5)

Re:inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

You're correct, but it's hardly insightful since keeping the leading zeros, and removing the dots works equally as well in decimal as it does in hex:

  216.34.181.48
  216034181048
0xD822B530

Re:inefficient

[Immerman]

Just pick the square closest to your door - with 10ft resolution you can even pick *which* door you'd prefer someone to go to. It's not easily navigable as-is, which is a loss compared to street addresses - but once translated to GPS coordinates it's easy enough, it just requires you have a cheap GPS device with the translation software. And unlike street addresses there's no inconsistencies to interfere with electronic mapping - my town has *lots* of spots where Google Maps and the like are off by a block or two, and good luck using them for rural addresses where being off by miles is not uncommon.

Re:inefficient

[Immerman]

I think the idea is not to use their website, that's just a demo application. The idea is to use their offline database to translate between an easily-memorizable "code phrase" and unambiguous GPS coordinates. Instead of trying to translate directly from your address (which introduces all the inconsistencies inherent in street-address to electronic map translations), find your house on the map. Heck, find your front door. *That* square is now your "address". Give it to anyone using a navigation system implementing this technology and they'll be able to find you without trouble.

Re:inefficient

[Immerman]

You can actually remember the coordinates? And communicate them without accidentally transposing digits? I'm not familiar with UTM, but it sounds like it's something like a distance-normalized version of latitude/longitude. And since the Earth's surface is 510 trillion m^2 (15 digits), any given 10m^2 chunk will require at least 14 digits to identify uniquely.

Plus it sounds like this has a built-in checksum system, so any communication errors will tend to be immediately recognized as such. Does UTM offer such a feature?

Re:inefficient

[Immerman]

rosy.brand.aardvark, third floor. (or Apartment 305)

What's the problem? Neither street addresses nor latitude/longitude handle vertical position either, yet we somehow manage to muddle through anyway.

Re:inefficient

[shugah]

The whole effort seems pointless to me. Ever hear of a PO box?

Re:inefficient

[Immerman]

Sure, but that's a lot more information to communicate and keep track of than three words. As you say, this is essentially a non-colliding coordinate hash - it's only useful with electronic assistance to perform the hashing, and GPS is cheap enough to integrate with your hashing system, which even without a map gives you a "distance and direction" compass to your desired destination.

And these days even dumb-phones often have GPS receivers for emergency response assistance, and typically more than enough memory and processing power to do the hashing. As such it just takes a little extra software to turn them into a 3-word "magic compass".

Re:inefficient

[guardian-ct]

correct.battery.staple is in a swamp in Newfoundland, northeast of Smallwood Reservoir.
stupid.coordinate.system doesn't seem to be in that coordinate system.

So, no, not nearby.

Re:inefficient

[Cinnamon Beige]

Now all services will be delivered to the person on the first floor below your apartment because nobody will think about the vertical direction not specified by the three words. Not very helpful.

Not quite; as long as I know the people in that apartment I can get my things, without having to play Guess the Shipper whenever I order something simply because one refuses to deliver anything if given my legal address--and I thought I've been very clear that I would be giving both. If they can't work out the obvious--that the door numbers are the last two digits of each apartment's number, and the rest comes from the building (each one with its own unique street address)--then the word triplet would hopefully manage to get it so my downstairs neighbor can either hold my package for me or go "Oh, yeah, upstairs."

Given some of the absurdity involved with getting things from Regularly Lost Pizza Delivery, it'd also mean they managed to get somewhat closer to where the hell I am. I can go downstairs and wait for them. In fact, I already have--one of them once worked out that this strange string of numbers was a 'phone number' and tried calling it. (I wish I was kidding.)

I'm not at all convinced this is going to work as a complete replacement for street addresses: I see it more as a way to do a 'parity bit' for street addresses, and extremely useful when you're in a city where the first question is "But which 321 Foobar St?" as presumably only one would be also matching the location designated as absurdity.eternally.ascendant and is more human-friendly for both memorization and transmission. Numbers are good for this if and only if we're just having machines talk to machines; otherwise, the nine-digit zip codes would be pretty much all that you needed to put on things you're mailing.

Re:inefficient

[Immerman]

More to the point, these "addresses" are designed for human use, and the brain stores words far more readily than number sequences. Same reason we use URLs online despite the fact that IP addresses are far more compact, only 8 characters in hexidecimal

As for numbers - the Earth has 510trillion m^2 of surface area, 51trillion unique 10m^2 locations, so any comprehensive addressing scheme with that resolution will require an absolute minimum of log256 (51,000,000,000,000) = 5.69bytes. Pretty bang on with your own calculations, suggesting their encoding algorithm is quite efficient.

Re:inefficient

[minstrelmike]

The whole effort seems pointless to me. Ever hear of a PO box?

1. Most people without street addresses don't actually live near a post office.
2. More importantly, FedEx and UPS can't deliver to PO boxes and that means no money in their pocket.

Re:inefficient

[anyGould]

And while 3x3m is lovely, that means that my house has several "addresses", and there doesn't seem to be a shared word between them.

Re:inefficient

[graphius]

Agreed. From what I see on a very quick browse, the words seem to be chosen randomly.

Re:inefficient

[ttucker]

You have a lot to say about UTM for someone that could not be troubled to even look at the Wikipedia page.

The three word system has a checksum in the fact that there are many more word mappings than actual rectangles on earth, so there will be no match in the database... but no real mathematical checksum.

It is a fun approach to the coordinate problem, but it IS NOT giving anyone more of an address than they did with lat/lon coordinates. Besides being easy to communicate (which is a big plus) it does not actually do anything that has not already been done... just with a startup and a licensing fee...

Re:inefficient

[Sarten-X]

As I described, most communication would require only four words, and those words have far less entropy that the word list used in this scheme. If I'm conversing with someone and giving them a location near me, assumptions can be made about any unspecified information. For example, if we assume that the location is in the same quadrant of the city, I only need to convey two numbers, and because they aren't hashes, even an approximate match will likely result in success.

We must also consider the nature of the numbers themselves, and human cognition. We're pretty good at remembering things, but pretty poor at remembering them accurately. Rather, we remember the connections between our memories. If someone tells me, for instance, that their location is "127, 64", I'll remember that by noting the connection to the powers of two that I already have well-memorized. On the other hand, "brass.apple.chimpanzee" has a good chance of being connected to "metal.fruit.monkey", and I'll end up trying to locate "tin.banana.gorilla". The word lists could be constructed to minimize the risk of such a cognitive hash collision, but with 40,000 words across 10 languages and being run through 4 billion memories, a small risk is still a high number of error.

Compounding that cognitive problem is the convenience of the system. If I'm talking on the phone with someone arranging a meeting, and I'm given a numeric location, I can mentally start working out roughly where that location is. It may not be close enough for navigating, but I can estimate the rough area of my destination. That serves as an error-correcting checksum on my memory that not only indicates that I've misremembered the location, but can be used to validate alternatives (like transposing numbers or coordinates). When I then use a GPS tool or dead-reckoning to navigate, I can be assured of the device's correct functioning as well as the integrity of my location information.

Of course, it's easy for us Slashdotters to assume the presence of cheap electronics... but this word-based system is being touted for use in extremely impoverished areas. These are places where long-term planning is irrelevant if one does not find the money for short-term needs. These are places where "building a home" consists of putting some garbage on the ground before sleeping. In those places, any electronics, even dumb-phones often get stolen and re-sold to wealthier folks (who usually have conventional addresses) for a few meals' worth of money.

Re:inefficient

[ttucker]

But you had to look them up. You had to go to a website, type both in, look at a fucking map, and determine that they are not right next to each other.

No other global coordinate system requires this, so there has to be a pretty good argument for why it is actually a good thing.

Re:inefficient

[ttucker]

Ignored in our shiny new thing fever... why can't I just give UPS the coordinates to my door?

Re:inefficient

[ttucker]

Thank you :)

Re:inefficient

[Immerman]

Actually I *did* look at the wikipedia page - that's where I got the sense that it was a distance-normalized version of lat/longitude. If you can offer a better summary, can I recommend that you add an intro to that article?

Re:inefficient

[Immerman]

I should also say, I agree it doesn't "do" anything in a technical sense, but then neither do web addresses as compared to raw IPs. The bulk of their functionality is in making things more convenient to our feeble squishy brains.

I agree that trying to license the system seems a little optimistic - conceptually they did nothing terribly innovative, but the benefit of a common standard might be enough to justify uptake by the big players.

Re:inefficient

[ttucker]

With a DNS address you are providing a mapping that is continually updated by the DNS system. This would be more analogous to having a three word coordinate assigned to you 'my . personal . address' that you can update with different lat/lon values as you see fit. This has a real technical value (besides being handy to humans) in that you can move a service to a different address without the maintenance of sending a new IP to all end users manually.

This is more like providing a static mapping of names to every ipv4 address that exists, so 192.168.0.1 would always be 'ground meat sausage banana'.

Maybe I am missing something, but what is the advantage of the words being randomly assigned? In UTM, we know that zones 10U - 20R are vaguely covering the USA, and that zones starting with 10 are west of those starting with 11. Is that a design shortcoming somehow?

Since the globe will never get larger or smaller, and the only really challenging part is deciding how to cover the glove with regular sized squares, how is it impossible to make an open source mapping?

I mentioned UTM in another post to you because it is a pretty good system for providing maps that have units in (approximate) meters instead of degrees. It is a well known standard that could easily be augmented with names for square areas. MGRS is an example of this narrowing the globe into 100km(ish) square units.

Re:inefficient

[uninformedLuddite]

in the centre of the startup office is a 3x3 metre hole called investors.money.dump

Re:inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL - epic.fail.city is just outside of Venice

Re:inefficient

[Anonymous Coward]

And a richly ironic address - sparsely.populate.city somewhere in the interior of China.

Re:inefficient

[j-beda]

Anyway, I love one of the blocks that could map to my place: "drones totally toasted" ;)

Not that anyone would go to Iceland anyways, but you just gave your physical location to within 4.2 meters on an internet forum.

Or at least *someone's* physical location.

Re: inefficient

[Rei]

Your second guess was "Fedora Elephant Lolliop"? You have some interesting guesses ;)

That brings up another interesting point. If people do get a wrong guess., 2/3rds of the time it will be out in the ocean. Even on land you'll hit a lot of places where virtually nobody lives, like Antarctica and such. And even where people do live... "Hmm, why do I suspect that what appears to be Yupic natives illegally living in ANWR aren't ordering commemorative NASCAR coins and an electric weed eater"? You know, it just seems that the odds of a misheard shipment resolving into a real, believable location are extremely low.

Re: inefficient

[KGIII]

After I saw some of the names in the links, I just went with an outlandish guess. My first was, as I recall, "elephant pink pajamas" which didn't get me anything.

I think, and I'm not sure, that this is supposed to be used in conjunction with other things. Namely, you get the address to your square and use it then others use GPS to narrow it down and then can see the overlay and figure it out from there. :/ I don't really know. I can't see it being of *any* value otherwise. It's more like a solution looking for a problem than anything else. I don't think it'll help the people they claim it will as much as they seem to think it will. I could, on the other hand, see it coming in handy for things like refugee camps and the likes but is there much need for that?

Re:inefficient

[Jack Griffin]

1. Most people without street addresses don't actually live near a post office.

But they live near a bank? What place is this exactly?

More importantly, FedEx and UPS can't deliver to PO boxes

But they can deliver to this new weirdo system which no-one knows of? Unlike a street name, which most people in a town know the names of, how does a UPS/Fedex driver know where each 3 word place is in the universe?

Re:inefficient

[Jack Griffin]

The obvious problem is getting everyone to use it, as they say in their video it would need to be added to services such google maps and integrated into GPS apps. Places like Africa, India, SE Asia, even outback communities here in Oz would benefit greatly.

This system is too stupid to even argue. Physical addresses need to benefit humans as well as machines, but this doesn't seem to address the first requirement in any way.

Re:inefficient

[piojo]

Your house already has several addresses. Street/st/St., Apt./Ste./Suite/Flat/#/Rm/Room, etc. Do you write the county/district? Do you write the state or omit it? What if you write the county instead of the city? Computers already handle all this when mail is processed. Same with names. You ever notice it's somehow never a problem if you omit your middle name on anything, or if you use your middle initial instead of writing out the full word? This new system is a many-to-one mapping of coordinate->residence. If you need more granularity, you can have it. "Room B, Horse Turbine Draw".

The bigger issue is the vertical dimension, which could be handled by adding extra data, if all buildings were made like in the US. They aren't. My last apartment was on "floor 6.5". And I think slums can be worse--if buildings grow together, a room could be on two different floors, depending on how you count. And the internal location won't necessarily correspond to the entrance of the building. This system seems like it's only for sparse locations.

Re:inefficient

[hoggoth]

No, it's not a vast improvement. It's yet another incompatible system with its own problems.
chew.bump.fantastic and chews.bumps.fantastic are in different states. Can you see the problems yet?
You say this is easy for computers to manipulate. How about determining which addresses refer to the same "postal addresses" when my front door and the mailbox at the end of my driveway have completely different words?

Not that much better

[Anonymous Coward]

"GPS coordinates require 16 digits, 2 characters (+/-/N/S/E/W), 2 decimal points, space and comma"

Looks like the 3 period separated words averages out to about 20 characters.
And numbers "translate" better in all languages than those 3 words.

Re:Not that much better

[Fwipp]

Sure, but how much brain space does it take to remember "58.169564, -153.170992" versus "leave aura corrugated"?

We're not computers - we remember words and phrases much better than we remember arbitrary number strings. How many bits it takes to store that information in a computer is irrelevant.

Re:Not that much better

[Anonymous Coward]

Three words are a lot easier to remember and to communicate accurately to others.

Re:Not that much better

[wile_e_wonka]

2 comments in response to this:

1) The 3 words narrow things down to 3x3 foot squares. The GPS coordinates narrow things down to approximately a housing block. I'm not sure how many digits it would take to get GPS down to the specificity of 3x3 foot squares, assuming it is possible. The point the creators are trying to make is that more detail is needed for most places.

2) I'll give you 60 seconds to memorize the GPS coordinates of a housing block versus 60 seconds to memorize 3 English words. Guess what will be easier for 99% of the population.

Re:Not that much better

[Sowelu]

Besides, everyone can use a healthy reminder not to decorrugate their aura.

Re:Not that much better

[Anonymous Coward]

Both the article and you are handicapping lat/lon by using 6 places of precision. 4 doesn't measure up to the 3m goal of the new system but 5 beats it. 6 is 0.11m of accuracy.

http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/8650/how-to-measure-the-accuracy-of-latitude-and-longitude

Re:Not that much better

[Anonymous Coward]

Which would you rather enter in your browser? "outlook.office365.com" or "132.245.20.178"?

Re:Not that much better

[currently_awake]

You can extend GPS to any arbitrary granularity, it's just not much use if you can't locate the spot because GPS can't give that accuracy.

Re:Not that much better

[MiniMike]

Neither.

Re:Not that much better

[Anonymous Coward]

*who speak the same or similar language (and accent!) as you.

Re:Not that much better

[Sigma 7]

I'm not sure how many digits it would take to get GPS down to the specificity of 3x3 foot squares

Four digits gives 11m squares, which is close enough for anyone making deliveries to figure out the exact location within that square. If you want a 5th digit, you now have precision that can tell the difference between trees.

Twin four-digits aren't hard to memorize, and there's not as much of a benefit for bringing it down to 3x3 squares.

I'll give you 60 seconds to memorize the GPS coordinates of a housing block versus 60 seconds to memorize 3 English words

Memorization is from use, not by picking a random block and asking people to memorize it in 60 seconds. Also, if one can't memorize their own postal code through normal use, then they probably can't function normally in society.

Re:Not that much better

[Beezlebub33]

But I know that 58.169564, -153.170992 is very close to 58.16957, -153.170988.

How close are pound.banana.hamster and dome.words.zone ? Are they right next to each other, or across the planet? Other numbering schemes are better. MGRS will let you specify general area to exact location. And you can figure out very easily how far points are from each other. I also like zip codes. I know that 22207 is close to 22206. I can get fine grained by going to 22207-2345. Having an 'address' that provides an exact point, but gives a human absolutely no idea where they are is terrible.

Re: Not that much better

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, here's an adaptive precision solution.

(1) draw a Hilbert curve on your favorite equal-area projection, break it into segments and give each segment a word, with words sorted by some semantic distance scheme

(n) repeat until desired precision is reached

(Out) banana.monkey.llama is near banana.monkey.gazelle and somewhat further from banana.monkey.pink.basil

(Profit) charge money from people to look up the coordinates and tell them that they have to pay because you're the only way the downtrodden lesbians of this desert tribe can get the organic LEDs they need to grow nutritional supplements that they need to feed to the endangered fuzzy puppies without contributing to climate change

Re:Not that much better

[suutar]

For zip codes, it depends a lot on the geography and history. 50061 and 50062 are 40ish miles apart, while 66206 is adjacent to 64114.

MGRS has benefits over lat/lon, but it's back to somewhat arbitrary long numbers, and to at least match 3m it needs 5 digits of easting and 5 of northing, plus the 4 characters for grid and square, so the benefits are not huge.

This system does require machine translation, granted; if you're trying to avoid that, then this system will definitely not work for you. But if you assume machine translation is available (and machines that can handle it are getting really common), then this system can be an easier way to pass the important parts of the data around.

Re:Not that much better

[suutar]

The giver of the data will probably have used it enough to have it down pat. The receiver, on the other hand, may not, and words are more resistant to transposition errors than coordinates.

Re:Not that much better

[Ramze]

I'm not sure why human memory vs computer storage needs to come into play here at all. Are all the delivery drivers memorizing these 3 words for delivery, or are they instead written down on the parcel or a manifest and checking against a computer system??? Seems the latter is more likely. Do the people at these addresses intend to stay at their location which would justify a sane simple numbering system. Or, will they roam around like nomads picking up their tents and/or makeshift housing every so often, thus justifying their need for a simple 3 word system??? The example given is shacks in Brazil that just don't have a decent addressing system. Seems a coordinate system would work better for stationary locations and delivery systems. There's no need to translate into random words and back when the underlying GPS system works just fine as-is.

Perhaps you are not as likely to recall a string of numbers as you are words, but many others do just fine. I recall my zip code, SSN, and the complete address of the many places I have lived without issue. I have no trouble remembering my phone number -- even with the area code! I'm sure I could remember my GPS coordinates if that were the system I regularly relied upon to send and receive mail.

The first 3x3 digits before the decimal of GPS are for a 110 Km x 85 Km area. That's a much larger area than most zip codes at the cost of maybe a digit. If somehow you forgot your 110x85 km code, you could ask your neighbor... or generally anyone within your city. As for the latter digits after the decimal, 4x4 digits is usually enough to specify a location to the precision of this new method. 5x5 is even better than the new method.

Saying you can't recall 4 to 6 digits for your city plus 8 to 10 digits for your house is ridiculous (Total 12 to 16). Most Americans know their 9 digit telephone number, 9 digit SSN, and their house number and zip code which are usually 9 digits as well. I'm sure human beings can adapt to memorizing 12 to 16 numbers with ease -- especially when many are the equivalent of a "zip code" that all neighbors share.

Also, for delivery drivers, it helps when distance is easily measurable or at least approximated. With this awful new system, you're completely reliant on the database and an active GPS signal to find out which direction to travel and how far to your destination. Purple.Monkey.Dishwasher could be miles from Battery.Horse.Stapler -- and in any direction! Even if the database works offline without an internet connection, how does a driver sync that database to walking/driving without an active GPS system? With GPS, at least if the power goes out or stormy weather blocks signals, you can know to drive in a general direction and approximate how far you had left to go or ask locals who know their own GPS coordinates for help in which way to go based on the coordinates of where you are and where you want to go.

Re:Not that much better

[wile_e_wonka]

Four digits gives 11m squares, which is close enough for anyone making deliveries to figure out the exact location within that square. If you want a 5th digit, you now have precision that can tell the difference between trees.

I think the point of the 3 ft squares is for very compact places, like slums in India, where there might be several "houses" in an 11 m square. So, to be comparable, it appears that you'd need that 5th digit. But it isn't really 5 digits. It's 5 digits after the decimal place. In each direction. Plus you need something to indicate direction (for brevity, I'd think +/- would be better than N/S/E/W). So, my address is XX.XXXXX,-XX.XXXXX, according to Google Maps. That makes 14 characters to memorize assuming I don't waste any brain power on the decimals and negative sign. This is approximately double the number of digits most people's brains supposedly prefer.

From what I gather from the comments, the benefits of the current GPS system are:

1) It already has a foothold.
2) It's easy to tell by comparing gps units where two places are compared to each other.
3) It can be more or less precise by adding or removing digits.
4) The digits easily translate to other languages (or, rather, they need no translation)

The benefits of the 3x3 system are:
1) It's really easy to remember the "address" for a very specific place.

The drawbacks I'm hearing for GPS are:
1) It's hard to remember the "address."

I think I'm now convinced that the GPS system is better. For example, in the 3x3 system, you can't say its in the vicinity of rabbit.tree.hook without having to look up what on earth (literally) that means. You need a whole new address for every language. In English, my address might be tree.rock.squirrel, while in spanish my address might be tango.juevo.puerta (because they can't use translations of the same words for the same place--here aren't enough words in the other languages and also words often don't translate cleanly). I was playing around with the map--squares very close to each other have completely different "addresses." And there is no way to address a larger quadrant, which is trivial in GPS by simply removing a digit.

I understand the issue with a GPS user's device having accuracy problems, but I don't see how the 3x3 system solves that. I think the versatility of the GPS system compared to the 3x3 system makes it ultimately superior, despite the comparative difficulty of memorizing "addresses."

Re:Not that much better

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, until the discontinue it.

Re:Not that much better

[tepples]

Then what would you rather enter into your browser when setting up Thunderbird? imap.example.com or 162.150.32.54?

Re:Not that much better

[Cinnamon Beige]

I'll give you 60 seconds to memorize the GPS coordinates of a housing block versus 60 seconds to memorize 3 English words

Memorization is from use, not by picking a random block and asking people to memorize it in 60 seconds. Also, if one can't memorize their own postal code through normal use, then they probably can't function normally in society.

It's easier to memorize a phrase than a group of numbers unless you can attach meaning to the numbers--I lucked out with my mobile phone number and only have to worry about transposing the last two 'elements' I use to remember it. If it was simply by 'use,' then we'd not bother with street names and use the 9-digit zip codes which do give a precise location.

Re:Not that much better

[Anonymous Coward]

I think "leave aura corrugated" was more of a warning that anyone nearby should leave, as the aura has attained corrugation and may become unstable at any time. Everyone knows an unstable aura can be both moist and schizophrenic, and as such, pose a danger to anyone within 3 inches vertically or 50 miles horizontally. Except magnetic due-west, in which case, safe distance is around 10 feet.

Re:Not that much better

[Anonymous Coward]

it's just not much use if you can't locate the spot because GPS can't give that accuracy.

Nor is a 3-word address that is just an encoded latlong. How are they going to find the spot if GPS is too coarse?

Re:Not that much better

[Anonymous Coward]

In English, my address might be tree.rock.squirrel, while in spanish my address might be tango.juevo.puerta

"juevo" is not a Spanish word. Did you mean juego? huevo? jueves? See what happens? You misremember one single letter and the information content drops to zero.

Re:Not that much better

[Anonymous Coward]

"canteen.perishes.cringe" ... memories

Re:Not that much better

[Anonymous Coward]

It's possible to provide adaptive precision with one coordinate for points in a space of arbitrary dimension by using a space-filling fractal, see http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8434933&cid=51059657 for one idea. I don't know why these guys aren't doing that, unless it's to make their system intentionally hard to use so they're the only ones with the key.

Re:Not that much better

[raynet]

I would just call to the helpdesk and let them figure it out :)

Re:Not that much better

[KGIII]

I didn't read the article but I opened the home page up in a separate tab. It's a grid added to the map. GPS gets you "close enough" and then the grid is available to refine it. It's pretty easy and looks like it'd be serviceable.

Re:Not that much better

[Immerman]

Sure, you may remember your 10 digit GPS coordinate at home for a similar level of detail - but how easy is it to remember the 10 digits your friend just told you over the phone so that you could find them? Or for a taxi driver to remember the coordinates he was just dispatched to long enough to type them into a gps?

Seems to me this is mostly a system to allow the easy communication of arbitrary GPS coordinates between humans.

Re:Not that much better

[Jack Griffin]

How much brain space does it take to know where all 57 trillion 3m2 locations are?
The current system may not be perfect, but it works quite well for people without the need for a database lookup.
It also makes it impossible to validate a unique address since the 3 words don't correspond to a legal boundary (ie my property address is legally mine). Stupid idea with so many holes it's not funny.

Re:Not that much better

[hoggoth]

Yes 'leave aura corrugated' is so easy and natural for a person to remember. Be careful though because 'leave aura corrugated' is in Alaska but 'leaves aura corrugated' is in Virgina. Damn where is that package of insulin shots I ordered? It should've been here days ago!

Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

I kind of like being off the radar.

Re:Meh

[tom17]

You are in luck! Your three words are:

off.the.radar

So much better

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a great solution. I hate lat/long, it's so damn clumsy. If it were two integers or even floats, that would be fine. But it's a half dozen different numbers to store two, with all kinds of stupid syntax all to get you down to a huge space. This is nice.

Re:So much better

[peragrin]

It is not a great solution. What happens when you don't live at ground level but on the second , third or 100th floor?

It doesn't factor in altitude.

At least in gps you could add altitude easily enough.

Re:So much better

[suutar]

Then you add "unit N", like you do now.

Re:So much better

[Anonymous Coward]

Then the address would be listed at "[word1] [word2] [word3] Apartment [x] Floor [n]"

It's not like this problem hasn't been solved for centuries... do you really struggle with it?

Re:So much better

[wonkey_monkey]

At least in gps you could add altitude easily enough.

By adding another number, right?

So just add a number to this scheme.

I live at purple.monkey.dishwasher.59

Re:So much better

[gstoddart]

As has been pointed out, some of these places are things like the favelas in Brazil ... there's no numbering, it's a chaotic mass of shacks.

The whole point of this is there often isn't a street name, or a street number, or a street, or anything which could otherwise be thought of as an address.

But, hey, keep thinking your 'simple' fix of just including the unit number actually has anything to do with a complex problem.

Re:So much better

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see New York City apartment building lined up on the 3 meter grid. So if 532 N 5th Street and 534 N 5th Street share a wall, will you have the delivery man explore 532 for unit 1042 and then 534 when not found?

Re:So much better

[PitaBred]

If there's no simple street name or number or anything, there probably aren't going to be that many stories to deal with, either

Re:So much better

[Anonymous Psychopath]

That isn't a problem it is trying to solve. I know no one reads TFA, but it's all laid out in TFS.

Re:So much better

[TurboStar]

It is not a great solution. What happens when you don't live at ground level but on the second , third or 100th floor?

If you live in a 100 story structure then you already have an address. This isn't meant to solve problems of another kind.

Re:So much better

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd imagine you'd pick the grid closer to the front door of the building that the driver is supposed to enter, rather than picking the ambiguous shared wall.

Re:So much better

[fuo]

Or the shifting continental plates... I saw an article yesterday promising a cure to aging within 5 years, therefore I need my mailing address to be valid for >1m years.

Re:So much better

[JMZero]

I mostly agree with your sentiment here - but ideally a new system would be able to address both needs (ie. it could pinpoint a shack amid a bunch of others, but could also identify an apartment in New York).

Regardless of that, I'm skeptical how well this system would work overall for many of the target populations for some of their applications (most importantly, delivery). How stable are these populations and their structures? How secure are they? I mean, in the developed world, if someone answers the door at your house, it's reasonably secure to hand them the package. Does that hold for many/all of the targets here, or would you get some kids go stand in Bob's place if it looked like someone was delivering a cellphone.

Does "door-to-door" service really make sense, or would these people be better served by a community mailbox and some sort of low-cost method for establishing identity at pickup? (I obviously think the latter makes more sense).

Re:So much better

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, isn't that just a fancy penthouse you have there!

Re:So much better

[Obfuscant]

I live at purple.monkey.dishwasher.59

And what is that in Portuguese? Or Swahili? Imagine the fun of trying to transliterate, or even communicate, a Chinese "three word" address.

Re:So much better

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, that answer comes straight from their FAQ, maybe you should read it instead of assuming everyone, but you, is a dumb ass.

Re:So much better

[Anonymous Coward]

If it were two integers or even floats, that would be fine.

Decimal degrees are a thing. I prefer them over degrees, minutes and seconds too, but they are interchangeable: 60 minutes per degree, 60 seconds per minute. Let's take the location of a Japanese restaurant for example: lat 36.675787 lon -121.656622. If you wanted that in degrees, minutes, seconds, take the decimal degrees, multiply by 60: 0.675787*60=40.54722. Then multiply the decimal minutes by 60: 0.54722*60=32.8332. So that gives us 36 degrees 40 minutes and 32.8 seconds north. Do the same for the longitude.

There are other numerical coordinate systems beside latitude/longitude, for example UTM.

Re:So much better

[Anonymous Coward]

They also use plural words. Forget the S and you at thousand miles away, or not findable.

swiping.embers.gossiped

Broken by design.

Re:So much better

[suutar]

In a case where there's enough floors to make a lot of difference there's also likely to be enough footprint that the coordinates of your actual location are not useful; the coordinates of an entrance to the structure plus supplementary information on how to navigate inside are what's needed. There are cases where that supplementary information is not already there and you do want actual lateral coordinates, but even in those cases "X, Y on second floor" is going to be more useful than "164 feet above sea level" or even "26 feet above ground" (is that the third floor or the fourth? Depends on the building.)

Re:So much better

[Anonymous Coward]

As has been pointed out, some of these places are things like the favelas in Brazil ... there's no numbering, it's a chaotic mass of shacks.

The whole point of this is there often isn't a street name, or a street number, or a street, or anything which could otherwise be thought of as an address.

But, hey, keep thinking your 'simple' fix of just including the unit number actually has anything to do with a complex problem.

As one who frequently entered the favelas, I can attest people do put house numbers up; there's just no rhyme or reason. If I like the number 88, I'll put it up even though my neighbors are 13 and 18.It was so bad that I kept a sorted list of all existing house numbers for each street, as well as an unsorted list. I can't count how many times people would give a bad address.

Re:So much better

[Anonymous Coward]

Well. Adding a unit number actually has something to do with this complex problem.

From the FAQ: "Flat 6, 5th floor, jelly.translated.sadly"

Tackles the problem in a non-perfect but still useful way.

How about you put that condescending arrogance of yours to the side for a little while and accept the fact that you are, in fact, not smarter than everyone else, hm?

Re:So much better

[wonkey_monkey]

I was just addressing the altitude problem. Buf if you insist on shoe-horning in your scepticism, no-one's claiming this idea is going to replace GPS coordinates for every use, and it's not meant to be cross-language. That doesn't make it entirely useless.

Imagine the fun of trying to transliterate, or even communicate, a Chinese "three word" address.

It's probably quite easy if both people understand Chinese. I understand there are quite a few people in the world who do.

Re:So much better

[Anonymous Coward]

You are thinking all-or-nothing. The community mailbox could be the address, only it would have a specific 3 word address now. In the future, there might be 2 community mailboxes, 100 feet apart. The 3 word address would be use helpful in distinguishing the two. You don't automatically have to use technology for technology's sake, and it seems like that is what you are suggesting people will do in the future. But the idea is sound, if the implementation is not. From my understanding, the ground is marked, not the structures, so it doesn't make a difference if they change buildings or not.

Re:So much better

[bohmt]

Maidenhead Locator System is another one, used by hams and might be a bit more human friendly.

Re:So much better

[Anonymous Coward]

It's certainly not as clumsy as having to have a LTE signal in order to run their app so you can hit their web API to figure out where the heck you are. Lat/long convey information. Those 3 words are completely meaningless with a wireless internet connection.

Re:So much better

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not numeric. You are aware that people in other countries use different symbols, aren't you? Only numbers are truly universal.

Re:So much better

[bohmt]

That's not numeric.

Neither is UTM. The latitude bands have letters assigned, from C to X.

You are aware that people in other countries use different symbols, aren't you? Only numbers are truly universal.

Oh the irony. You do know that each major script used in India has its own numeral glyphs? Or the Arabic - Indic numerals have a few regional variations, most of them being nothing like the Arabic numerals you imagine?

Re:So much better

[Obfuscant]

I was just addressing the altitude problem.

And I was pointing out the problem with your solution to the vertical problem.

and it's not meant to be cross-language.

Well, then, isn't it a good thing that delivery services never operate across language boundaries and nobody ever sends packages across those boundaries.

It's probably quite easy if both people understand Chinese.

Yes, I suppose so, but if one of them does not ... You know, this is an English language discussion forum, so I think it is fair to assume that a comment about communicating Chinese words might have an implied assumption that at least one of the people involved doesn't speak it.

Re:So much better

[Anonymous Coward]

Just check with ISIS, that's what they provide for each of their satellite Internet connections.......

Re:So much better

[wonkey_monkey]

And I was pointing out the problem with your solution to the vertical problem.

Were you? It sounded like you were pointing out a more general problem with the three-word code.

The answer in Swahili would just be three Swahili words followed, again, by the height in metres (or whatever unit would be most ameanable to people who speak Swahili)

Well, then, isn't it a good thing that delivery services never operate across language boundaries and nobody ever sends packages across those boundaries.

*groan*

Yes, as I've already said, you've come up with a scenario where it doesn't work so good. That doesn't mean it never, ever works. In fact, for the kind of uses the inventors are positing, it seems less likely that any language barrier will need to be crossed. The services and facilities that people living a Calcutta slum need aren't likely to require crossing a language barrier.

You know, this is an English language discussion forum, so I think it is fair to assume that a comment about communicating Chinese words might have an implied assumption that at least one of the people involved doesn't speak it.

I don't see what the prevailing lanuage on Slashdot has to do with hypothetical examples.

You seem overly fixated on dismissing this idea by picking at flaws which are simply aren't going to apply in most cases. Might as well scoff at blood transfusions because you can't donate A to a B recipient.

Re:So much better

[Anonymous Coward]

They also use plural words. Forget the S and you at thousand miles away, or not findable.

That's the point. It's supposed to do that. It allows for automated (and manual, for that matter) detection of incorrectly specified locations much more readily than when using latitude/longitude for example.

So it's by design and not broken.

Try to be less arrogant and open to the possibility that you are actually not the smartest being on this planet.

Re:So much better

[KGIII]

I've concluded that some folks just won't even read the summary. I get that reading the article is verboten and I'm no heretic, so I usually will only even consider opening an article if I want to see pictures. That said, not reading the summary is kind of hardcore. It's like going bareback on a Bangkok whore because you lost a drunken bet with your friends. Sure, it might be fun but when you're pissing fire you'll look like an idiot.

Re:So much better

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever been to a Rio Favela? There is definitely verticality, if not 100 stories of it.

Re:So much better

[Moloth]

Well, then, isn't it a good thing that delivery services never operate across language boundaries and nobody ever sends packages across those boundaries.

I cant read italian. Although I can cut and paste: blocchi.seduta.indici

Re:So much better

[RockDoctor]

and it's not meant to be cross-language.

It might be an idea to, like, RTFFAQ?

We have rolled out our 3 word address system in 9 languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili, Russian, German, Turkish & Swedish. We are adding to those every month and are currently working on Italian, Greek, Arabic and more.

Given a 25 to 40 thousand word wordlist, then smaller and older languages with small dictionaries might pose a problem, but simply working down the list of languages by speaking-population will address that on a minimum effort basis. I'm only surprised they haven't tackled either Chinese, Korean or Japanese yet. Though Japanese should succumb to kanji transliterations, if nothing else.

They do somewhat overstate the difficulties of current location systems. I use UTMs frequently, and they don't bother with positive or negative numbers, or north or south. Everything is so-many metres north of a point a few thousand kilometres above the south pole, and everything is east of a point a few thousand kilometres west of the zone of validity. So you need an integer (UTM zone), two reals (northing and easting) and an optional real for altitude. Perfectly convertible to any other geodetic system, though the calculation is not human-friendly.

I did have some questions about the way they manage to get to 3m.sq grids from such a short wordlist, though I'm willing to accept it can be done. Perhaps an extension of "magic square" methods for allocating resources in (statistical) experimental design. Unfortunately the "technical report" goes off to Dropbox, which is absolutely forbidden here, so no joy.

Re:So much better

[dotancohen]

It is not a great solution. What happens when you don't live at ground level but on the second , third or 100th floor?

Why does that matter? The system cares about "where does Pablo Pyeterovnichoskayovski Schendenstalvesialvskidurnik the Eleventinth return at the end of the day", not "how to identify which butt cheek to put this vaccination in". Even Western addresses apply to more than one individual, for instance my wife and children all share the same address with me, and the Beduin men share an address with four wifes and children.

Re:So much better

[wonkey_monkey]

It might be an idea to, like, RTFFAQ?

I meant it doesn't work between speakers of different languages, i.e. translating purple.monkey.dishwasher into Chinese won't get you the same square (it probably won't even be valid).

Re:So much better

[RockDoctor]

That's why I was trying to read the technical paper, but it fell foul of the firewall against Dropbox.

So, translating "squiggle.wombat.banana" into Spanish would lead to a different location. Hmmm, that would be a major failing, and I couldn't see that in the FAQ (because after RTFA, I also RTFFAQ). Nor in the "technical paper". And without that, I don't see the benefit, really.

After all, though it goes beyond my knowledge of Spanish, I wouldn't be surprised if the Spanish for "squiggle.wombat.banana" were something not far from "escriblo.wombat.banana" (two of the words being very non-Spanish, and even non-Romance. Possibly non-IndoEuropean). Which would make the wordlist part of things much more complicated.

I know why I was thinking down those lines - I read Wossname-XKCD's "What If" book on the plane to work, and was wondering if his "Thing Explainer" idea was worth reading on the way back (if I could find a copy) ... thousand word long word list ... then this comes along with a slightly longer wordlist.

Excuse me ... thinking on keyboard. 10000km pole to equator. 40000 along the equator. Therefore 333000 by 1332000 3m units for 443556000000 3m.sq units (first approximation, OK) sorry, double that to take on the other hemisphere. 887,112,000,000 units. Stick in the thousands markers. Not far off a trillion.

So, to name those million-odd parcels with a wordlist, you'd need nearly a million words for two-word addresses, 10,000 words for three word addresses, and you could do it with four words using Munroe's (I remembered his name, if not the spelling) thousand word wordlist.

And I've got to go and do some work. Damn - I'll miss the galley.

Re:So much better

[wonkey_monkey]

So, translating "squiggle.wombat.banana" into Spanish would lead to a different location.

I think they've tried to avoid transaltion clashes, so it wouldn't translate to a valid address at all.

And without that, I don't see the benefit, really.

The benefit is it works as proposed if two people speak the same language. And the kind of people who'd find this most useful are the kind of people less likely to need to cross any language barriers.

Re:So much better

[Jack Griffin]

So it's introdcuing yet another system, which isn't a solution.
It would be much easier for poor people to construct a street sign and paint some numbers on their dwellings...

Re:So much better

[RockDoctor]

Hmmm, I'd have to think quite a lot on that last point. But then, I'm in the process of trying to organise airfreight for a half-ton of stuff from a Francophone country to China, via a Dutch-speaking country, using personnel from a mix of Norway, UK and America. Oh, and the Phillipenes too. Can't forget the Filipenos!

Did I mention Customs paperwork? Even that would be simpler, since each of the countries involved has their own way of formatting addresses.

More likely to be used by drones than post offices

[WarJolt]

I can't imagine this being useful for a post office in developed countries. Drones on the other hand, are going to deliver packages in a back yard and if you can tell the drone search for a place to drop a package in a 3m by 3m square that's definately useful. Especially if there is a designator nearby to better pinpoint the landing zone.

Sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have any time to write something insightful. I have to head out. Catch ya later

Re: Sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

What a shame, I was looking forward to your contribution.

my 3 words

[Anonymous Coward]

it is counter intuitive. can't they pick words that are somehow related to the place? like the first word being the city name for eg, Manhattan.Tribecca.Box

Re:my 3 words

[mwvdlee]

It's not really unambiguous: http://www.getzipcode.us/en/in...

Meaningful words are also likely to cause idiots to start political wars.
(Though even meaningless stuff, such as in this case, may be at risk of dipshit politicians if it ever takes off).

Also, most places this is intended for have little in the way of any nameable thing, including cities.

Re:my 3 words

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not really unambiguous: http://www.getzipcode.us/en/in...

Meaningful words are also likely to cause idiots to start political wars.
(Though even meaningless stuff, such as in this case, may be at risk of dipshit politicians if it ever takes off).

Also, most places this is intended for have little in the way of any nameable thing, including cities.

Not sure what you mean.

If latlong is that hard to remember you can simplify it a bit. Say http://geocoder.ca/P45x3691N75x7007

this system has no hierarchical structure, hence there is no way to tell that ping.pong.doll is next to up.down.out

75%

[Nidi62]

75% of the Earth's population, i.e. four billion people, effectively "don't exist" to modern computer systems because they have no physical address. The "unaddressed" can't open a bank account, can't deal properly with a hospital or an administration, and can even struggle to get a delivery.

Because those Kalahari tribes are really desperate to receive pre-approved credit card spam, hospital bills, and their Amazon Prime deliveries.

Re:75%

[suutar]

probably not, but being able to easily express which watering hole they're camped next to this week may be useful for the guy hauling ebola vaccine doses.

Re:75%

[gatfirls]

Well how else is the non-existent local public or commercial delivery infrastructure supposed to find them?

Re:75%

[currently_awake]

Having a mail box is not a prerequisite for having money or interacting with government.

Re:75%

[MastaBaba]

But for that to work, the San tribesman in question will need a connected electronic device to tell him what his three words are.

Re:75%

[ebvwfbw]

probably not, but being able to easily express which watering hole they're camped next to this week may be useful for the guy hauling ebola vaccine doses.

Maybe you're new to humanity. You should know that's not how it would be used. Sure, it could be used that way. It almost surely will be used sooner or later to kill them. Oh, they're over there... go kill them. Unfortunately that's just the way things are. Humans seem to love to kill each other. Especially remotely.

Re:75%

[suutar]

The database/lookup table is supposed to be small enough that it can be embedded instead of being a network-service. However, the conversation I was thinking of at the shipping depot is like so:
"Take this truckload of vaccines and these two med workers to the San tribe."
"Where are they hanging out this week?"
"let's see... latest aerial scans show activity around this spring at alpha beta gamma"
"Cool, we'll head out in 20."

Re:75%

[Jack Griffin]

probably not, but being able to easily express which watering hole they're camped next to this week may be useful for the guy hauling ebola vaccine doses.

So this guy, a nomaditc tribesman used to subsisting on ants and cockroaches, now has to carry an iPhone on him to let his witch doctor know where he is?
This has to be the stupidest idea i've heard all year.

Re:75%

[Jack Griffin]

The database/lookup table is supposed to be small enough that it can be embedded instead of being a network-service. However, the conversation I was thinking of at the shipping depot is like so: "Take this truckload of vaccines and these two med workers to the San tribe." "Where are they hanging out this week?" "let's see... latest aerial scans show activity around this spring at alpha beta gamma" "Cool, we'll head out in 20."

Any local will know where the spring is so this system is useless. It also relies on "aerial scans" whatever the hell they are.
If they have awards for stupidest idea ever, then this needs a nomination.

Re:75%

[suutar]

who says the tribesman is the one doing the navigating? He's just the intended recipient of the cargo in this scenario. He has no particular need to be aware of the methods used by a truck driver to find him.

Re:75%

[Jack Griffin]

who says the tribesman is the one doing the navigating? He's just the intended recipient of the cargo in this scenario. He has no particular need to be aware of the methods used by a truck driver to find him.

Er, depending on what type of tribe we're talking about here, the tribesman doesn't hang around in one spot. And he doesn't hang around paved roads...

I'll just leave this here..

[Anonymous Coward]

https://xkcd.com/927/

three words, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I call dibs on WTF

Re:three words, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, that's already in use in DC. Describes the entire area.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[gstoddart]

I can't imagine this being useful for a post office in developed countries

Well, think this is an example from TFA (Japanese characters removed):

Here is just one example, an address in Tokyo.
100-8994 (zip code), (Tokyo-to, i.e. Tokyo prefecture or state) (Chuo-ku, i.e. Chuo Ward) (Yaesu 1-chome, i.e. Yaesu district 1st subdistrict) (block 5 lot 3), (Tokyo Central Post Office).

Apparently, in some places addresses can get pretty screwed up.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[suutar]

Japanese addresses are so generally screwy that it is normal behavior to draw maps when giving directions.

Or use a more open alternative

[Anonymous Coward]

https://plus.codes/

Re:Or use a more open alternative

[wonkey_monkey]

11 alpha numeric characters to memorise, or 3 words? Hmm.

Re:Or use a more open alternative

[Obfuscant]

11 alpha numeric characters to memorise, or 3 words? Hmm.

If you tell me your lat/lon coordinates, I can tell immediately what part of the world you are in, and with a simple map I can get it down to a much closer approximation.

To do that with 3-words, I'd have to memorize not just 3 words, but 57 quintillion combinations of those three. In multiple languages.

The poor fellow who is waiting at the water hole for his Ebola medicine is going to have to learn a lot more three word combinations just to describe his normal daily routine than I would every have to memorize UTM or lat/lon pairs. I've got a GPS that can tell me that data; which GPS currently on the market (or likely to be on the market ever) will tell anyone the "three words"?

And as for the "approximate location", all it takes is truncating the UTM or lat/lon data -- trivial to do. To approximate a "three words" location requires a completely different set of three words. Or do you think you can just say "I'm going to walk 1/2 mile east of here, so meet me at, umm, what's barf.snicker.retch plus 1/2 mile east again?"

Not that stupidity again

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know what the real "lingua franca" is? Numbers. And numbers don't need a fancy encoding that requires the use of a computer to map it back to actual location information.

Re:Not that stupidity again

[sexconker]

Not only that, numbers have inherent relationships (ordering) which you can use for shit like direction.
Tell me, is a.b.c north or south of x.y.z? By how much?

Re:Not that stupidity again

[Zontar The Mindless]

No, it's not the first time it's been discussed here, and Yes, it's still cute for about 10 minutes until it dawns on you what an incredibly stupid idea this is.

Unless you're what3words and you're trying to enhance your "oooh! shiny!" revenue stream by conning other services into tying themselves to your system, of course.

Re:Not that stupidity again

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way, whatever happened to the Internet Time? Remember?

Re:Not that stupidity again

[Zontar The Mindless]

The website is still there, and still features a local-to-SIT converter. More than that I do not know.

Re:Not that stupidity again

[graphius]

exactly this. ^^^^

YASISOAP
(Yet Another Solution In Search Of A Problem)

Re:Not that stupidity again

[hoggoth]

Yeah WTH? Why didn't they make a three number triad, with each number from 0-40,000. It would look similar to IP addresses, eg: 185.38921.7823
Works everywhere the same without looking up words in a thousand different dictionaries.

As a matter of fact, I think I'll put together a service to translate What3Numbers to What3Words and Long/Lat.

I can image that

[Anonymous Coward]

I those remote country they don't have road sign, street address but they all have smart phone. I could see them use that much quickly in that first world country.

Hah. Article's lead image screws up the concept

[wonkey_monkey]

http://www.mondaynote.com/wp-c...

Nice job, dingbat. Your image shows an address collision within about 500 metres.

And you need to learn about drop shadows, or at the very least adding outlines to text.

Re:Hah. Article's lead image screws up the concept

[Anonymous Coward]

You say: "Your image shows an address collision within about 500 metres."
Call me stupid. I do not get this, but am curious to know what I am missing.

Re:Hah. Article's lead image screws up the concept

[rhazz]

There are two different points on the map that are quite far apart, but both are labelled "brass.table.pen". Obviously a mistake in the graphic, but if taken literally it implies that their system is broken because the addresses are not unique.

Re:Hah. Article's lead image screws up the concept

[Anonymous Coward]

The addressing systems is supposed to be unique down to a 3m by 3m meter square. That's the size of four tall people lying down in a square. In the picture there's two places with the same address which are roughly 12 houses apart. So it's a complete failure because this thing can't have collisions (duplicate addresses for different locations) for it to work and because the collisions are so close together (compared to one brass.table.pen being in China and the other in USA).

It's probably a failure of the person who made the image (since it's so hard to read the labels), but it's like a resume. If they can't get their primary ads correct, how can your trust their implementation?

Re:Hah. Article's lead image screws up the concept

[Anonymous Coward]

brass.table.pen is used twice in the center "row" of the image for locations on opposite ends of the favela pictured.

Re:Hah. Article's lead image screws up the concept

[Anonymous Coward]

That's over a picture of a favela. Someone must have stolen an 'is' off the end of of one of the labels.

Re:Hah. Article's lead image screws up the concept

[ssyladin]

Not to mention that brass.table.pen isn't even legit in the system.

http://w3w.co/brass.table.pen

Re:Hah. Article's lead image screws up the concept

[wonkey_monkey]

As others have said, "brass.table.pen" appears twice. I don't blame you for not seeing it, since (per my second point) the text is barely readable in the first place.

Re:Hah. Article's lead image screws up the concept

[Anonymous Coward]

No no, one of them is actually "brass.table.penis" but then they had to censor it before publication.

Hay guyss

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a raspbErry pi and I'm learning how to code. I think html is cool and I'd like to be an html5 engineer . Mark zuckerberg is totally one of my Heros. Come on let's make the world a better place!!!

what about elevation?

[danbob999]

In a high rise residential building, 3x3 meters isn't precise enough. We also need to know elevation.

Re:what about elevation?

[JoeMerchant]

3 words plus one number?

Re:what about elevation?

[Anonymous Coward]

A high rise residential building has a well defined and well understood and frequently used address

Re:what about elevation?

[Sowelu]

This is mostly a solution for disorganized places where unit labels don't already exist. If they exist (that high rise building), use them. Doubt you're going to be stacking scrap-metal shacks more than two or three high, and even in that situation you're still identifying a small enough group of people that you can probably talk to all of them at the same time (unlike multiple floors of a high rise) to find the person you're looking for.

Re:what about elevation?

[PitaBred]

3x3 plus an apartment number? You find the building, you can find the sub-section of it. But the point is more for places that don't have solid street names and such, which aren't likely to have high-rises to any appreciable extent...

Re:what about elevation?

[mspohr]

A lot of "organized places" have screwy street names (change names along the route or over time) and numbers (i.e. Japan).

Re:what about elevation?

[k3vlar]

As many other people seem to have pointed out, there's nothing stopping you from using a unit number like you currently do. Like saying, for instance: "1907 gender.dizzy.ranged".

Re:what about elevation?

[CelticCoder]

Good question. According to their FAQ at http://what3words.com/faq/#tog... "Most postal or address systems only work in 2D (e.g. ZIP codes or postal codes in the UK). These always need additional information to specify height: e.g. Flat 6, 5th floor, 12 Lonsdale Road. With what3words, we recommend a similar approach, e.g. Flat 6, 5th floor, jelly.translated.sadly" That kinda makes sense. If you knew the elevation was 20 meters, is that 4th or 5th floor? So adding text to the address is a good solution.

Re:what about elevation?

[currently_awake]

Ensure you add negative altitude, some people live in caves, or their mothers basement.

Re:what about elevation?

[OhPlz]

Kowloon City, if it still existed. There are disused skyscrapers occupied by squatters in various parts of the world, but yea.. generally there'd be a floor number at least.

Re:what about elevation?

[JoeMerchant]

Wouldn't it just suck to be located at: balls.rust.painfully?

Re:what about elevation?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is mostly a solution for disorganized places where unit labels don't already exist.

Right. So I'm standing in the middle of a slum in Mumbai, how the fuck do I figure out which 3x3 meter square I'm in?

Re:what about elevation?

[KGIII]

Umm... Download the app? You know this is supposed to be used in conjunction with an app and GPS - right? It's not a stand-alone nor is it designed to be and it doesn't purport to be.

Re:what about elevation?

[graphius]

Victoria, BC has Cedar Road, Cedar Avenue, Cedar Hill Road, Cedar Hill Cross Road...

A few years ago a local radio station ran the following (tongue in cheek) warning:
"Attention tourists. Please note the name of the street you are driving on as it is likely to change at any moment"

Way more true than many would like to admit...

Re:what about elevation?

[Anonymous Coward]

That.not.exist

Re:what about elevation?

[Jack Griffin]

So just add the address? Why bother with their stupid idea at all?

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you in a multi-floor building?

My 140 sq m apartment has 15 separate addresses. Which one(s) do I use?

I remember that last time they covered this

[Chris Mattern]

And I still have the same thought: "Hidden Forbidden Holyground".

embarrasing.word.combination

[Sigma 7]

As with all systems that blindly pick words and string them together, you're bound to encounter some that are less than flattering. "danger" and "skunks" appear in one pair of three, etc. Thankfully, this is only a parking lot, but imagine a person's place of residence with something like that.

And what if you don't want to "exist"?

[Anonymous Coward]

I will not make any deals with you. I've resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own. I resign.

Are there swears in this list?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wanna live at FuckShitBitch :/

Re:Are there swears in this list?

[Anonymous Coward]

nope. even words that sound like swears are removed.

Nobody mentioned Bitcoin yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's it going to take for people to accept the glorious, glorious future that is universal money?

Ring the Doorbell FFS

[nukenerd]

bad addressing costs the Royal Mail £775m per year.

So how will this system solve that? A sender can still give a bad address. Most badly addressed mail that I nevertheless get has the postcode wrong, a fairly arbitrary set of letters and numbers. This new system is a totally arbitrary set of words. People do not remember post codes - they copy them from an address book, incoming letter, or database and can copy it wrongly. Likewise, people are not going to remember these word triplets (I've got 50 Xmas cards to send), they will copy them from an address book, incoming letter, or database and can still copy it wrongly. Get one word wrong (I gather pluralisation matters) and it will go to Timbuctoo instead of Kansas.

It would save the Royal Mail and other couriers a lot if their guys actually rang my doorbell when they arrive instead of just posting a "You were out" card through - they seem to have a phobia about it. But I live in a remote scenic area and I think they like the idea of a second morning's relaxing drive this way instead of fighting city traffic the following day.

Re:Ring the Doorbell FFS

[Anonymous Coward]

I found my location includes the word "falls". While typing it in, I misspelled it as "fails". This typo resulting in a location about 1800 miles away.

Re:Ring the Doorbell FFS

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably more error-resistant than a postcode. If you misspell a word it probably won't be another, valid word, and you can work backwards to the correct one. How many off-by-one postcodes are valid? Probably a lot.

Re:Ring the Doorbell FFS

[Anonymous Coward]

This, yes.

Addresses need to be resilient. That means that they need to have redundancy, and it also means that they physical proximity of addresses needs to translate to conceptual proximity.

This enables the postal services to figure things out if there's a problem. On a local scale, "28 North St" is next to "30 North St", and if a letter to Mrs. Cathy Dixon has the wrong of the two, the postman will know that Cathy really lives at 28, not 30, and he'll drop the letter off accordingly.

On a larger scale, if you put the wrong zip code a letter will still arrive, it'll just take longer. I've had a letter where people wrote my area code instead of my zip code; it arrived with a sticker indicating it had been routed to Bumfuck, Alabama first before reaching me. Took a month to arrive, but arrive it did.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[currently_awake]

For delivery, having a "radio homing beacon" mode on your cell phone would be more useful. It would also be a great feature for emergencies.

Three Word Address? That's RACIST!

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you telling me that there's going to be some kind of breakdancing competition at cardboard.announces.gathering ?

Re:Three Word Address? That's RACIST!

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you telling me that there's going to be some kind of breakdancing competition at cardboard.announces.gathering ?

Here's a link for the lazy, uh, breakdancers. (click on Map / Satellite)

No address

[Anonymous Coward]

What an idiotic system. There already exists a solution to this problem.

Generate an IPV6 address for each 3x3 square. Encode the same address in a chip and implant this chip in each individual who is allowed to occupy the 3x3 space. Any person whose implanted chip does not contain the correct address may not occupy that space and will be subject to immediate detainment and questioning. We can also look into walling off each 3x3 square so that no illegal square immigrants come in.

Do you people have any other problems you need me to solve for you today?

Sincerely Yours,
Donald Trump

Re:No address

[gnupun]

Dumb solution. What about people who occupy hundreds of 3x3 squares?

Re:No address

[Anonymous Coward]

You pretty much described how passports work.

Re:No address

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Obviously, multiple implants!

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[NoImNotNineVolt]

I can't imagine this being useful for a post office in developed countries.

Japan

problem is no permanent address

[kencurry]

Not that this guy doesn't know that already; he needs to get his startup funded so let's just skip over that.

If you just need to pin-point a spot on the earth, GPS is your goto method. But as others point out, identifying a spot on earth != usable address for commercial/social/infrastructure purposes.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[MindStalker]

Whichever one you want.
what3words is a word -> lat/long service. It works extremely well for lat/long information. Perfect for saying where your geo-cache is, or even telling people where to meet in the park, or approximately where you are in some rural area. Its not a replacement for an actual address, but certainly can help if you don't have an actual address.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Klaatu, Verata, Nickto.

barada! for Gods sake man, it's barada!

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[PIBM]

I have the perfect location for the drone dropping at cuties.exciting.layover ! I'll fetch the package (and the drone) from the trees once it's here :)

There's one thing which I don't like; it's not open source // using a generic & simple algorithm and they want to charge for lookups. That kills it for me, no matter what kind of discount based on country they are using. It is very simple (and not the fist time) such algorithm are used. I favor precision-adaptives one like which isn't wasting address space but anyway...

What about the 3rd dimension?

[Punto]

Do I share my 3 words with my downstairs neighbor?

Re:What about the 3rd dimension?

[nukenerd]

Do I share my 3 words with my downstairs neighbor?

Yes

Re:What about the 3rd dimension?

[KGIII]

Only if your apartment is limited to a 3x3 square. Otherwise, you can use the one you want so long as it's in your residence (I'm assuming). Otherwise, append a floor number or another descriptor like, "Not the downstairs neighbor, they're assholes."

Cool but looks too closed/proprietary

[bongk]

This seems like a cool idea, but are we really going to get the world to start using an algorithm for determining location that appears to be proprietary and closed-source? I was looking to find specifically how it works and as far as I can tell you can only implement this by downloading apps or APIs from what3words, and their closed code will do all the work mapping locations to words and vice-versa.

Why would anyone build any type of important solution or process on top of this and have their hands tied to this one vendor to use it going forward. Its not like you could upgrade or convert to a different process later if your plan was to get people to use this new method for specifying their location.

Re:Cool but looks too closed/proprietary

[akpoff]

There are also the questions of long-term viability of the company, patents and copyright issues on the three-word locations. On their website they promise the tech will always provide free ways for individuals to use it. And in the case the company can no longer maintain the technology (or find another company to do so), they also promise to release the technology and code into the public domain.

what3words will always be free for individuals to use on our own site and apps. If or when we do charge for access to our web API or offline SDK, there will always be ways to use them for free.

In particular, we intend to support fair and equitable use of our core addressing technology. We employ a fee structure that provides qualifying organisations with a range of free and discounted usage plans, in addition to country-based pricing. Qualifying organisations will include humanitarian and not-for-profit entities in any country, and regional and national government and associated organisations registered in countries that fall under the World Bank Low-Income Country (LIC), Lower-Middle-Income Country (LMIC) or Upper-Middle-Income Country (UMIC) categories. Discounts are based on world economic indicator data compiled and published by the World Bank.

Furthermore, we understand that organisations whointegratewhat3words need assurances about the long-term viability of the technology.

Our goal is for what3words to become a global standard for communicating location. At the moment, the core what3words algorithms and data are not in the public domain. In the future, we may release some or all of our source code â" we will continually evaluate the business case for doing this.

In the meantime, we commit to the following:

If we, what3words ltd, are ever unable to maintain the what3words technology or make arrangements for it to be maintained by a third-party (with that third-party being willing to make this same commitment), then we will release our source code into the public domain. We will do this in such a way and with suitable licences and documentation to ensure that any and all users of what3words, whether they are individuals, businesses, charitable organisations, aid agencies, governments or anyone else can continue to rely on the what3words system.

Promise on pricing page.

That's a lot of promising.

I really like the idea but I'd like to know it's free and open for everyone to use without limitation. Like many things, the market will ultimately decide its fate.

Re:Cool but looks too closed/proprietary

[Anonymous Coward]

This would be relatively easy to code.

First you would generate a list of word combinations until you have enough. Start at aardvark.abacus.abandon (as an example) and keep iterating through generating out to word-list.txt until you have enough combinations to your desired resolution.

Next (or during), you iterate through all GPS coordinates to your desired resolution and map them each to a name: aardvark.abacus.abandon == 0.000,0.000. Et cetera. These lookup tables could then very easily be open sourced, whether in plaintext with a delimiter, or in a database. The map then just loads the names from the GPS coordinates that are supplied by Google Maps or any other mapping software/API.

Extremely simple. This could be coded in maybe, 15 minutes, ignoring the time it would take to generate the words list (and obviously, you'd have to check for no duplicate values and other logistical things, but the way I would code it in my head, it wouldn't even be an issue).

Re:Cool but looks too closed/proprietary

[Kjella]

What the fsck is their technology anyway?

Encode like this except with 0.0002 degree precision = 50,000 offsets instead of 10,000,000 so it fits in a short. You now have a 2+2+2 = 6 byte = 48 bit coarse representation of a coordinate. Take a dictionary, number words 1-2^n in binary. I'd say n=16 for 65536 of the 171,476 in the Oxford English Dictionary. You now have 3*n = 48 bits of data. Map. Done. Seriously, that's all.

Re:Cool but looks too closed/proprietary

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the same anon poster as parent. I just checked, for example, their 0,0 GPS is "prosecuted.amplification.showings," if you remove the final 's' ("prosecuted.amplification.showing") all of a sudden you're in the middle of Australia. Thus, if someone makes a misspelling in any way, shape, or form with their system, you could literally be thousands of miles off.

If you used a continuous (alphabetical) system, then as others have said (that you'd have to memorize 100+ word pairs just to describe where you're going that day), you could instead say, "yeah, today I went from prosecuted.amplification.showing all the way to prosecuted.amplification.zebra." In fact, it could be that the first word would be all in the exact same country then. So you could know that if the first word is "orange" maybe it at least has to be in India. With their system, there is no rhyme or reason to it.

So, no offense to who coded this, but someone could do a lot better job in my opinion. The GPS -> Location name tables would be everything here. The map showing things to the user is just the icing on top, basically.

Re:Cool but looks too closed/proprietary

[Anonymous Coward]

I looked up these 3 words:

Beautiful free pussy

Then I went to Google Street View to see what was there. Imagine my disappointment when I saw kittens playing in the street.

Re:Cool but looks too closed/proprietary

[nukenerd]

are we really going to get the world to start using an algorithm for determining location that appears to be proprietary and closed-source? ......... Why would anyone build any type of important solution or process on top of this and have their hands tied to this one vendor

Don't worry, market forces and competition will be our friends. Other companies will introduce rival systems with totally different word combinations. In time there will be dozens of alternatives, all different. So your address will need all of them with perhaps semi-colons between each, and each to include a fourth word for the mapping or courier company or other organisation that runs the scheme. So this might be my address :-

exploding.giant.dump.what3words;handsome.troll.bollocks.ups;paedophile.boy.wanker.boy_scouts_association;windows.scam.caller.Indian_Government_Mapping;
metrosexual.brick.shithouse.kamakaze_cycle_kouriers;fancy.gay.prancer.US_Post_Office;bloody.hell.sherlock.Ordnance_Survey;damn.blast.soddit.royal_mail;

and so on (my emphasis). More than three words now, but what fun.

Re:Cool but looks too closed/proprietary

[Endo13]

if you remove the final 's' ("prosecuted.amplification.showing") all of a sudden you're in the middle of Australia.

I suspect that's exactly the point. It makes it obvious to anyone whether or not they have the correct address.

Re:Cool but looks too closed/proprietary

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it's odd.

Considering that Google already wrote their own system (which they then open-sourced):

Link: http://openlocationcode.com/

Re:Cool but looks too closed/proprietary

[Anonymous Coward]

You can reduce the number of bits by doing something fancier with the high latitudes to reduce bits and choosing shorter, less confusable words, but I think you're totally right.

S/Key used a dictionary of 2k: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1760.txt so you would need four words instead of three. What is the incremental value of one less word? I don't think there is any value to the world. The value added to the company is that a larger dictionary creates a tiny fake barrier around it within which you can claim you have something cloudy to sell. so, not much. All of the real value in this company would be in network effects, after they convince some companies with actual market power to use the system and force it upon others.

Yes, I think the end-game here is "get Google to pay fat sacks to 'license' it or to buy the company and make it free." The pricing page reads like a pit of smarm. I cannot tell what moves they expect others to make in the tricky game of engaging with them, or what other moves they'll make to react. If I were Google, I would redo their work just to avoid dealing with them. Maybe they have a patent to flog in that case, or something. Otherwise, the whole company should be replaced with a reddit post and a link to the S/Key RFC for the dictionary. Looks like another tech bubble, guys.

There's also a problem I don't yet understand how it's solved. The addresses aren't unambiguous as claimed, not by all definitions of unambiguous. Most places will be covered by many 3x3 tiles, so which one is the address? Google offers API to solve this problem, called "reverse geocoding":

  https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/intro#ReverseGeocoding
  competitors: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3513134/how-to-reverse-geocode-without-google

The task requires a huge, constantly-updated database, and the results vary in quality. It allows you to attempt an answer to the question, "are two addresses equal?" It will give slightly less noisy answers if you stay within one database, but it still gives (noisy) answers across databases.

Answering this question for, say, 75% of the addresses in your database has a lot of value, and currently we can at least do that well. You may also need it to prebundle mail, fight fraud, send junk mail, probably other things I haven't thought of---naturally they focus on what you can do with the limited system not what you can't, but it isn't an equivalent replacement for today's addresses, and it certainly isn't better at being "unambiguous" than existing addresses are at least not for all purposes.

After conversion to three-word addresses, there is no way to solve this problem. They don't provide the database, but that isn't the problem. With normal addresses, you can canonicalize them with reverse geocoding then answer "Are they equal?" offline by string comparison. With threeword addresses, yes, you can still answer the question, but you must make a database call every time you want to ask "are two threeword addresses equal?" because there's no canonical threeword address for a feature. This is much less powerful because you can't do indexed joins. You would be making that call from within tight loops that do not scale. You can't do simple API calls to other companies that include addresses as opaque uids, or other local manipulations that include this knowledge---you need this to build a checkin app like Foursquare, for example.

Re:Cool but looks too closed/proprietary

[WolfWithoutAClause]

They seem to (perhaps unwisely) also be doing some encryption or modulo arithmetic or something to make sure that neighbouring cells have completely different words.

I think many are missing the point

[Ozzymanii]

Granted, this is not a perfect system. As some have already stated, it dot not address elevation, and the words are not in a predictable order. This is not supposed to replace GPS, it is, in a small, easily *PRINTABLE* or storable form, a way to refer to places that don't have conventional addresses, and do it in a way that a person can easily remember. This is invaluable for hikers, campers, archeologists, doctors, aid agencies. Pretty much anyone that needs to find a place in the back of beyond, or convey a location in the back of beyond easily. As as to elevation, should the need arise, it is fairly easy to tack on "3rd floor" or "10 meters up" to the address to get an exact point in the universe.

Re:I think many are missing the point

[nukenerd]

The only really positive comment I have seen here, from a guy with his first ever post.

Nice astroturfing.

Re:I think many are missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Retard, this system is fucking stupid.

Latitude and longitude coordinates are a small, easily *PRINTABLE* or storable form, a way to refer to places that don't have conventional addresses, and do it in a way that a person can easily remember. This is invaluable for hikers, campers, archeologists, doctors, aid agencies. Pretty much anyone that needs to find a place in the back of beyond, or convey a location in the back of beyond easily. As as to elevation, should the need arise, it is fairly easy to tack on "3rd floor" or "10 meters up" to the address to get an exact point in the universe.

This entire scam is just a stupid startup looking to gouge some venture capital.

What could go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

75% of the Earth's population, i.e. four billion people, effectively "don't exist" to modern computer systems because they have no physical address. The "unaddressed" can't open a bank account, can't deal properly with a hospital or an administration, and can even struggle to get a delivery.

We are Borg. You will be assimilated.

Hilarity ensues!

[juancn]

So I checked the site, and the tree words that it picks for the location it guessed I was at are "meto.pienso.coger", which in Argentinian Spanish would translate to something like: "I put (something) in. I think. To fuck" Somebody didn't think this through.

Re:Hilarity ensues!

[Jon Abbott]

Agreed. I looked and some poor schmuck three hours north of Brisbane, Australia has the address "riding.hustlers.hotel". No joke.

Re:Hilarity ensues!

[Jack Griffin]

In Boston is rear.entry.party

why random?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why in the world would they have a completely random set of three words for each location? I move ten feet down the hall and go from "abruptly.irrational.badger" to "cohesive.iguana.baseball"? Instead of, say, "abruptly.irrational.badminton"?

I don't get it. If you can go to their app and get the location for any set of words, then the process is reversible, so what would be lost by making it ordered? That way you would eventually develop a brain mapping, for familiar locations, of roughly where "abruptly.irrational" is.

Re:why random?

[Anonymous Coward]

You loose some of the error checking capability. The words are not completely random - the word combinations are deliberately defined so that any valid similar 3 word addresses map to places so far apart that it should be obvious when looking at a map that you have used the wrong address.

Re:why random?

[swb]

I would have thought there could have been some kind of hierarchy to it so that a two-word combination could have described a larger area with the third word providing the exact 3x3 square. Sort of the way IP routes summarize a network.

I suppose two words isn't enough for that purpose but three manages to give them a ton of resolution, but still its kind of non-helpful to have such fine-grained resolution with three words only to have adjacent places be named something completely different.

I can see people arguing -- "you're supposed to be at wet.stinky.dog!" "I'm really close, at fire.table.nose".

Re:why random?

[nukenerd]

the word combinations are deliberately defined so that any valid similar 3 word addresses map to places so far apart that it should be obvious .. that you have used the wrong address.

It is never possible to under-estimate the intelligence of a courier.

Re:why random?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but then people could use the system without the closed source app.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[NatasRevol]

Which ever one is easiest to remember.

Go explore the map.

I'm at generates.flat.quaking temporarily.

Oblig

[jxander]

You live at horse.battery.staple, correct?

Re:Oblig

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I live at off.my.lawn

6th floor

Re:Oblig

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly not a real location to them!

Re:Oblig

[Anonymous Coward]

Argh!!! My password!!!1!

Re:Oblig

[LunaticTippy]

Sadly, that is not an address. I poked around a bit and discovered mule.staple.battery conveniently located deep in the great white north.

Back in 2013

[ardmhacha]

An older slashdot story about the same thing

"Describe Any Location On Earth In 3 Words"
http://news.slashdot.org/story...

dupe

[slew]

http://news.slashdot.org/story...

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you in a multi-floor building?

My 140 sq m apartment has 15 separate addresses. Which one(s) do I use?

Which ever one is easiest to remember.

Damn, the upstairs neighbor is already using the easiest one to remember. The downstairs neighbor took the one I want. Those 15 addresses didn't last long in my 30 story building.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[Obfuscant]

It works extremely well for lat/long information.

Hardly. There is no easy conversion, you have to go online (or have the database on a smart device) to find out the translation.

Its not a replacement for an actual address, but certainly can help if you don't have an actual address.

Except UTM can easily address down to the nearest meter (or better), is a world-wide global standard (is both known worldwide and applies worldwide), and is found in most GPSs, if not all. For addresses within the same grid square, it is trivial to determine how far away and in which direction the destination is. It uses a global character set and needs no translation from one language to another -- which 3words cannot do anyway.

But OMG, it is so much easier for everyone to learn the new three words system in all the different languages than for me to learn a handful of numbers.

Super Awesome Dragons

[darkain]

I want to go where the Super Awesome Dragons are at! https://map.what3words.com/sup...

Re:Super Awesome Dragons

[LunaticTippy]

Me too. I live in super.lame.dragons

Re:Super Awesome Dragons

[careysub]

Better stay away from hungry.awesome.dragons.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[Anonymous Coward]

Good idea. And the drone can use GPS to determine if it is in the right 3mx3m square. It can map every "word combination" to a GPS coordinate. Really, the stupidity of this idea is immense.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[painandgreed]

Japanese addresses are so generally screwy that it is normal behavior to draw maps when giving directions.

Yes, I've heard that map programs for finding addresses are the first thing that Japanese install on their phones. Outside of every train station and otherwise scattered around are maps of the neighborhood that show blocks and buildings with their numbers. See, everything is divided up by Prefecture, City, Neighborhood, Block, Building (floor, office) and numbered in no particular standard order for streets that are certainly not even laid out in a grid pattern. There's no way to find an address without a map in in someplace like Tokyo as sometimes the building isn't even marked with their number (because they expect you to be following a map). Much worse than London and their need for AtoZ.

ten character maidenhead

[Anonymous Coward]

ten character maidenhead should be sufficient, without the need for translation

Fire Control!

[Anonymous Coward]

"We're pinned down by heavy fire! I need an artillery strike on index.home.raft. Over."

What happens if your aura becomes corrugated?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ia ia iA CardBoArdThULU fTaGN!

I'm Not Going To Say That This Is The Stupidest Th

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not going to say that this is the stupidest thing I ever heard of. I am going to say that this might be the stupidest thing I ever heard of.

It just might be.

'What's the distance between apple.flag.dalvik and tactless.imbecile.fellatio?'

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[crow_t_robot]

But which tier??????

Not viable until it's opened

[watermark]

They would charge companies to use it, which makes it unusable in the bigger picture. If they opensource their algorithm and word list under a good license, this has a chance. Until they do that, this won't go anywhere.

Imagine the big mail/freight carriers having to pay them every time they have to translate a 3 word address. Not going to happen.

Re:Not viable until it's opened

[Areyoukiddingme]

Imagine the big mail/freight carriers having to pay them every time they have to translate a 3 word address. Not going to happen.

Obviously Congress needs to pass a law mandating that the USPS charge money for access to their address database. This taxpayer funded government service can't possibly be efficiently enabling commerce. Then what3words can compete on a level playing field. Which is only fair and proper. Or possibly fair and balanced.</sarcasm>

Re:Not viable until it's opened

[careysub]

They would charge companies to use it, which makes it unusable in the bigger picture. If they opensource their algorithm and word list under a good license, this has a chance. Until they do that, this won't go anywhere.

Imagine the big mail/freight carriers having to pay them every time they have to translate a 3 word address. Not going to happen.

Absolutely. If this entire database and resolution software cannot be embedded in an arbitrary device free of charge, it has no chance.

Promoting this idea and monetizing it are mutually exclusive.

Woorld's population

[colinrichardday]

The world's population is 7.3 billion. 75% of that is over 5 billion. How did they get 4 billion?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Let's all go to glorious.leader.shamed

[JoeMerchant]

In Mexico:

https://map.what3words.com/glo...

Wrong order

[Daetrin]

"The 'unaddressed' can't open a bank account, can't deal properly with a hospital or an administration, and can even struggle to get a delivery."

Putting a "can even" or "can't even" at the end of a list implies that that last option is especially surprising or shocking. However in this case struggling to get a delivery is pretty much a no brainer.

If you want someone to send you something, the person you're asking needs to know where to actually send it. If you can't accurately describe where you are then they have no way to get to you.

Opening bank accounts or going to a hospital on the other hand are things that shouldn't actually require you to have a permanent place of residence, labeled or not.

Re:Wrong order

[del_diablo]

Bonus points for renting post box is a valid option to get a address. It costs what.... 100€ to rent a postbox for a entire year?
Thats a valid mailing address, and I think its the same for most of the world: If you don't have a house that has a post address, a central town area or location(such as a store, hotel or anything) might have one. The usage of hotels for mail is a pretty good example, and we have a long standing tradition for that.

75% of the world lacking a postbox isn't anything to care about, when most of them will be able to receive mail if they wanted.

Re:Wrong order

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, where I have experience (Australia and UK) you *can't* get a post office box without a physical address!!

Sounds absolutely fucking crazy I know, but they cite "security", "terrorism" and "fraud" as the reasons...

Re:Wrong order

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I don't see the issue. I live in a small town in Central America, and I don't have an address. I have a bank account. I get packages delivered. Commercial locations in the center of town have addresses. Pretty much any cafe, bar, small store, or restaurant will gladly accept packages for you. The electric company prints out an invoice from a hand held printer when they read your meter and then puts it in your door.

Re:Wrong order

[Anonymous Coward]

ugh, anguish. Without declaring a place thugs can go to break kneecaps no one will do business with me. What I really need is a swiftie-pulling startup to come civilize us to enable the structured retaliation that power hierarchies require so that we can join the Capitalist grid, at the bottom, where we belong.

Re:Wrong order

[Anonymous Coward]

No permanent address? Just wait until banks start requiring storing your biometric details, charge you 5% for "keeping" your money, and cash transactions over $50 are criminalized.

Can't wait for the military applications!

[Anonymous Coward]

Speak the magic three word incantation to make someone, anywhere "go away"

UPS is a poor excuse for this system

[Obfuscant]

In my area, UPS has already figured out how to drive one mile less a day. They stop by my house ONCE, leave a pretty little yellow slip of paper somewhere (sometimes on the front door, but that usually falls off and I've found them in the front lawn) and I have to drive 20 miles round trip to the local UPS office to pick whatever it is up.

Oh, yes, I could pay them extra money to deliver it someplace else that they ALREADY GO TO EVERY DAY where I actually am during delivery hours, of course. It would cost them less than trying a second delivery to the same address, but I should pay more for it.

Re:UPS is a poor excuse for this system

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you get your deliveries where you actually are during delivery hours in the first place?

You're complaining they don't go dig out your package from somewhere, put a different address on it, re-sort it, and deliver it to the new address for free?

I think they are supposed to try 3 times, so if they're only trying once, shame on them.

Re:UPS is a poor excuse for this system

[Obfuscant]

Could you get your deliveries where you actually are during delivery hours in the first place?

Sure. When I tell people to send me something, that's what I do. And then people send me stuff I didn't ask for and don't know is coming, and I wind up driving 20 miles to get it.

You're complaining they don't go dig out your package from somewhere, put a different address on it, re-sort it, and deliver it to the new address for free?

They have to "dig it out" when I come pick it up, right? They have machines that print labels, right? They already go, every day, to the place I want it delivered. It costs them nothing to do this, and I consider "delivery" as part of the service they've already sold to the person who paid them to DELIVER the package.

I think they are supposed to try 3 times,

At BEST, that means I would have to "sign" for the item without actually getting it and then they'll leave it tossed someplace convenient for them on my front step or lawn where they KNOW I am not. If I never see it, how can I say it wasn't delivered if I SIGNED FOR IT?

This is why I say that UPS has already figured out a scam to save themselves lots of miles, so pretending this three word system will be good for them is just stupid. They don't need a reason not to drive those miles they are paid to drive.

Re:UPS is a poor excuse for this system

[Anonymous Coward]

At least you don't have to endure a week's worth of those yellow paper which all insist you can pick it up the next day at the post office, but you can't actually. After a week, you decide to be home, so you're sitting outside on your front steps and watch the postal worker put the "you were out" in your mail box. When you go to the post office, they tell you that you came too quickly despite the "you were out" note stating it would be at the post office by 4pm. When you ask for a manager, you get told there isn't one. When you file a complaint online, the postmaster insists your lying. When you bring him the pile of weeks worth you were out notes to him at the post office, he cusses you out dropping f-bombs. Then when they look for the package they say its still on the truck and you'll just have to wait longer. Two months later, I was actually able to pick up my package.

If I'm buying online and they don't offer an alternative to the USPS, I do without.

We won't go into the three monthes to get a key to my mailbox as the "key maker" was on vacation. Or the three monthes we went without mail "due to a malicious dog", really a perfectly sweet St. Bernard that was locked in our house, wasn't barking, but did move the curtains box to look outside. Note: our mailbox is on the street; the postal worker doesn't get out of their vehicle

Re:UPS is a poor excuse for this system

[rubycodez]

UPS at my last neighborhood would never do that, instead they'd leave things like computer systems on the sidewalk near my townhouse door. Nothing was ever stolen but jeez

Stealing ideas from ICAO to give...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not even interesting, and for a very big example of prior art just look at any waypoint navigation chart for any airport. Navigation point names - for example: GREEF, which is a precision waypoint outside Andrews JAFB (Home of the Presidential 747s) - are pronounceable words, each one actually unique. So this brilliant idea is just adding another couple of words (literally) to the scheem.

*YAWN*

Combination PizzaHut TacoBell

[Yergle143]

I'm where it's at...

Grids and landmarks

[spaceyhackerlady]

I too thought of my Maidenhead grid square (I'm typing this from CN89lg).

The most generally whacked-out addresses I've seen are in Costa Rica. No house numbers or anything, mail is addressed by landmarks. One hotel I've stayed at had the postal address "300 meters East of the Escazú Country Club, Old Highway to Santa Ana, Escazú, Costa Rica". Mail may be addressed with respect to any well-known (to locals, at least...) landmarks; I've seen stuff that referenced the town square, the bus station, even the local McDonald's.

...laura

BUT...

[Anonymous Coward]

They say it is "cost efficient"

Doesn't everyone want an address that costs money to use? That guarantees that not every one will use it so you still need an alternative.

Off to write my new app that will give every person a unique number instead of those confusing names. Should be a piece of cake being a whole order of magnitude smaller :)

send your complaints to: 43947-35524 @ steps.water.tree

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[Cinnamon Beige]

Japanese addresses are so generally screwy that it is normal behavior to draw maps when giving directions.

Yes, I've heard that map programs for finding addresses are the first thing that Japanese install on their phones. Outside of every train station and otherwise scattered around are maps of the neighborhood that show blocks and buildings with their numbers. See, everything is divided up by Prefecture, City, Neighborhood, Block, Building (floor, office) and numbered in no particular standard order for streets that are certainly not even laid out in a grid pattern. There's no way to find an address without a map in in someplace like Tokyo as sometimes the building isn't even marked with their number (because they expect you to be following a map). Much worse than London and their need for AtoZ.

If there's maps outside the train stations, I never saw one--I ended up just buying a map of the city while I was in Tokyo. The numbering of buildings actually is, however, in a particular order--by age, more or less. (Good luck.) Neighborhoods and blocks do follow sequential order if you're wandering the right direction--for example, 4-3 followed 4-2 and 4-1, and sometimes 4-4 did as well. (Exactly what direction to go is something you have to learn, but it can be picked up quickly, and you can generally work out where to start looking for the koban or a person to ask with a bit of wandering. Worth it if you are living in the neighborhood, since that means you can get it down to the building number and thus having a good chance of finding somebody who knows where that is.)

Street names are a rarity in Japan because they think more of intersections--which has its own logic, really--and in Tokyo you should be thinking of all of it as being like NYC with about 4 times the boroughs because, well, that's...pretty much what's going on. (This is why Tokyo is called a metropolitan area and not a prefecture.)

good idea, badly executed

[Anonymous Coward]

who wants an address like 'cuts.goats.shut'. really?

Re:good idea, badly executed

[careysub]

who wants an address like 'cuts.goats.shut'. really?

Oftentimes you will have the option of picking an adjacent address bloc, which will be entirely different.

Re:good idea, badly executed

[Overzeetop]

Beats being located at rusty.trombone.cafe

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it would be a lot easier to just tell the drone a GPS location to go to.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[WarJolt]

I can't imagine this being useful for a post office in developed countries

Well, think this is an example from TFA (Japanese characters removed):

Here is just one example, an address in Tokyo.
100-8994 (zip code), (Tokyo-to, i.e. Tokyo prefecture or state) (Chuo-ku, i.e. Chuo Ward) (Yaesu 1-chome, i.e. Yaesu district 1st subdistrict) (block 5 lot 3), (Tokyo Central Post Office).

Apparently, in some places addresses can get pretty screwed up.

Address systems are difficult to change. If it was easy to change a system then all the Japanese addresses would be changed to something sane. The hierarchical address designation in the in the US follows the same uniform format almost everywhere and seems to be simple enough for most people to follow. I think most people prefer this to what is more or less a GPS location. The hierarchy is typically, country->state->city->road->address. Although we get screwy with zip codes. Some cities have multiple zip codes and some cities share zip codes, so feel free to replace city with zip. It's funny though that zip codes are more designed for processing the mail, which much of it is done by machines now. I still think this structure is far better for post offices because post offices interact with people. Machines can care less about these things that humans use to organize locations. Finding a postion based on GPS location is much simpler for a machine. Even if machines use roads the mapping GPS positions to roads is quite trivial. The 3 word combination is more for the machines than it is the humans.

IPV4 vs IPV6

[NMBob]

Why didn't they just go to 1m x 1m and 4 words? It's Zip+4 all over again.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[pregister]

But OMG, it is so much easier for everyone to learn the new three words system in all the different languages than for me to learn a handful of numbers.

Yes, you understand. It isn't about you remembering your own address. Certainly easier to remember 3 words someone tells you than it is to remember lat/lon.

This sounds like a video game...

[txsable]

It reminds me of the Chaos Gate field codes in the .Hack series....

http://dothack.wikia.com/wiki/...

Children

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see this being useful for very young children to tell police, fire brigade etc where they live, assuming the public utilities can understand what they're talking about.

"I live at coal.meat.feather, Officer. It's on whatthreewords.com". BTW, "whatthreewords.com" does alias to "what3words.com", I just tried it.

What about Manhattan?

[Ugmo]

Problems in Manhattan:
3x3 meter square is probably bigger than average apartment there.
What about Z coordinate? 90 story condo probably has 90 other people (1 on each floor) in the same 3x3 meter square for X and Y coordinate.

This may be covered in the article. I did not read.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay to that; when a train or a plane crashed, someone tracking all the beacons could finally say "I felt a great disturbance in the Tracking, as if hundreds of signals suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[painandgreed]

I'd find them fairly often. Never had to use them much while I was there but I looked for them as they tended to be cool looking bronze plaques mounted usually around where the train station would dump you out on the street.

This must be Hillary's old office

[Myria]

focal.email.opera

Already solved

[WinstonWolfIT]

I thought this was what ipv6 was for.

fail re: ten character maidenhead

[Anonymous Coward]

beware, Mr.
if it's not at least 18, that maidenhead is underage.
try and SJW your way out of that, you sicko.

George Carlin's former address

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit Piss Fuck

Re:Those 75% don't matter anyway

[nukenerd]

Who cares about those people anyway? They don't contribute, they don't produce, they don't pay taxes, or grow the economy.

The worst thing is that they are apparently incapable of coming up with things like street names or block names for themselves (according to TFA anyway).

Come on you 75%, it isn't rocket science.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[Anonymous Coward]

My property is very big [I'm really rich]. I have hundreds of 3x3 squares in it. I should be able to name them by myself.

What about Homophones?

[thewils]

I was waiting for you 3 hours at "write.plain.genes" no....not "right.plane.jeans"!!

Re:What about Homophones?

[NotInHere]

The word lists need to be created in a way that there are no pairwise homophones. You just start with a large list of words and then check for similarities. This is a quadratic job, but doable I guess.

Earth has a surface of 510.000.000 km^2. That's 5.67*10^12 pieces of 3x3m squares. Take the third root of it, you get 18 thousand pairwise non homophone words you have to come up with.

Geohash

[MrEcho.net]

Why not use a existing system like Geohash?

9mu-wym-wdx-qyh-####
The -#### would be extra data for room/suite

Re:Geohash

[NotInHere]

Because they are a startup, and want to make money. If they used an existing system, anybody could just simply use the system they do the marketing for, for free. They don't want that, obviously.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[Obfuscant]

Certainly easier to remember 3 words someone tells you than it is to remember lat/lon.

Three random words? No, I don't think so. It will lead to assumptions like yours that "this is so easy to remember, I don't have to write it down." And then, you forget. Or you remember a homonym or synonym instead of the actual word. It will go into your short term memory and you'll try to dredge it back up a day or two later and fail.

At least a UTM coordinate is hard enough to remember from the beginning that you will write it down. And if it is important to know where it is, you'll enter it as a waypoint in your GPS. Which you cannot do with three random words.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[Anonymous Coward]

My grid square is EM85sg - is that good enough? Or do you really want greater precision?

Squares are wasteful, try Goldberg polyhedra...

[KonoWatakushi]

They make it sound like mapping squares to a sphere only introduces a minor deformity near the poles, but it inflates the required addressing space by a factor of four. If instead they used an efficient and nearly uniform mapping like a Goldberg polyhedron, it would reduce the set of words required from 40k to about 25k to address a similar area.

It would require a little more calculation for the mapping, but it seems more consistent with the goals of the system. The icosahedral symmetry also allows for another interesting possibility of using one of the faces of the Dymaxion map as a part of the address. The region would then be specified by a single letter, and then 3 words chosen from a set of less than 9000. Even if the region is not made explicit, the mapping could take advantage of the fact that a number of the faces are primarily water.

The three word address is an interesting idea, but it may not be wise to assume that every language has 40000 words at its disposal. I also question the value of being able to specify an arbitrary address, when people may not have the hardware to do the mapping translation, or a means of navigating to the location. I'm guessing that many of those places without real roads may also lack things like electricity.

Re:Squares are wasteful, try Goldberg polyhedra...

[Anonymous Coward]

(1) gather together your favorite 1326 words (that's a triangle number)
(2) use 1320 for the first coordinate, because that's another triangle number times 20, the number of sides of an icosahedron
(3) four words puts you in a triangle 7m on a side
(4) (bonus) put words that are close in meaning close together, or put words in stripes by first syllable and other stripes by some other consideration, so people know where they are in the triangle

Re:Squares are wasteful, try Goldberg polyhedra...

[NotInHere]

The optimal number of words is 18k, basing on a calculation using the earth's surface. Earth has a surface of 510.000.000 km^2. Divide through the area of your square (9m^2), account for different units (1 km^2 is 1.000.000 m^2), and you get 5.667*10^12 pieces of 3x3m squares. The third root gives one 17829 words to find.

unless you don't know

[Anonymous Coward]

"It’s better to be 400 miles out than 1 mile out so you know instantly that you’re wrong and don’t set off to the wrong place!"

If you don't know where you're going, and only have a bunch of words. How do you know you're at the wrong place?
At least with number-street-city-state-country addressing you have multiple levels which you can look at to see whether you're close or not.

Math problems

[tompaulco]

It takes them 5 MB to store a 40,000 word dictionary? They must be literally storing a dictionary including the definitions, too. Average length of a word is 5.1 characters. Assuming 2 byte characters because they will probably want to use some multinational words just to use extra space, that gives an average of 10.2 bytes per word, or about 398.5k with no compression. Probably about 56k after compression.
More math issues, each specific location takes 3 words, which will be an average of 30.6 bytes. Another pesky problem of using words is they are not all the same length, so you can't specify a fixed record size, which you would undoubtedly want to do. If they used Lat and Long, those can be stored in a signed float for a total of 16 bytes, period. Need to add altitude, you can do another signed float for another 8 bytes, or you could cheap out an probably used a signed small int. The word approach doesn't even deal with altitude, so there would have to be another field to store an apartment number or floor number or use the GPS altitude.

Re:Math problems

[yes-but-no]

It takes them 5 MB to store a 40,000 word dictionary? They must be literally storing a dictionary including the definitions, too. Average length of a word is 5.1 characters. Assuming 2 byte characters because they will probably want to use some multinational words just to use extra space, that gives an average of 10.2 bytes per word, or about 398.5k with no compression. Probably about 56k after compression. More math issues, each specific location takes 3 words, which will be an average of 30.6 bytes.

I believe 5MB includes dictionary for a lot of languages [no I don't think giving 2 bytes per char is enough as sufficient redundancy is not lost; for n languages, we need to multiply by n, the average size per language - yes in this case 5.1bytes are enough - i think they seem to use only small case.. so 5-bits per char is sufficient for an English like language]
Also 3 words don't need 30.6 bytes; you just store the 3 indices into the dictionary; ie 3 times 16bits; or 6 bytes each. [16 bits can index upto 64k words]. Also all 4B addresses can be ordered; hence you don't really need to explicitly store the lat, long; I believe they use some perfect hash tables to map this 4B address space into a 3 tuple of 16-bits each. [or take care of collisions in some way.. of course using direct storing requries 4B by 6 or 24GB]

Not cool, flawed

[martin-boundary]

It's not a cool idea, it's analog flawed: Using 3 words as a tuple to represent squares is a naive hashing scheme with all the problems this entails.

Unlike numerical coordinates, word coordinates in this scheme don't have a natural topology. So when you search table.book.lamp and you find that it's a square in Johannesburg, there's no way to know what the neighbouring square is called. Worse, you might try to guess table.book.football, and that could be some place in Antarctica.

Suppose you communicate your 3-word coordinates with a Southern Texas accent to a Canadian. They might not hear the second word properly, and now you've sent them to Tokyo instead of New York.

Suppose you live in Idaho, and you need a package delivered but you type your address in with a typo in one of the words. Normally, with a proper human address like 1234 Pennsylvania Avenue, the truck driver first finds Pennsylvania Avenue, and then if 1234 turns out to be a typo and the correct address is 1235, the delivery will be close by and the neighbours might bring the package over or tell the driver it's next door. With 3 random words the cost of redelivery skyrockets to a distance of half of the world's circumference, on average.

Furthermore, the uniform grid sizing causes more problems than it solves. The world is not full of uniformly sized, 3x3 apartments which can be uniquely identified with a single address. Using this system, many places of interest in the world receive hundreds or thousands of effectively randomly assigned addresses which all refer to the same logical unit of location in the human world. That makes communication less precise.

Suppose you want to meet your friend in the park. How do you communicate the idea of "park", which is an aggreegate of so many addresses? You might simplify and say let's meet at the bench in front of the fountain. What if that bench is occupied? You won't be able to meet at those coordinates. Now suppose there are hundreds of people near there, you might not be able to meet your friend unless you agree on some square coordinates that are much further away. For example, you might want to meet at a concert, but where in the hall would that be, and how would you know an hour before then while sending an SMS?

Suppose you want to describe the idea of a kid skateboarding in that same park. With a traditional human addressing system, you can say there's a kid in the park, and that is valid for the whole duration of the event . With this system you'd have to say there's a kid at bridge.pool.steak, fifty.moron.quantum, blah.blah.truck, etc. since the kid is moving around the whole time.

Similarly you wouldn't be able to warn people about disasters efficiently. Say there's a flooded street or a shooting, you'd have to say don't go to a.a.a, b.b.b, c.c.c, ..., z.z.z etc By the time you've listed all the coordinates it might be too late, and never mind the world salad. It would also be a problem for television news presenters. Hash function sequences don't compress well.

There's a reason why the world uses many different coordinate systems simultaneously, inluding ultra precise ones like GPS. They all have their purposes and are the simplest systems for their purpose, respectively. This 3 word system however doesn't have good geographic locality because it's based on hashing, and suffers from complex aggregation issues. It tries to do too much and yet fails the analog test. It's badly flawed for human use.

Wrong problem, wrong solution

[jd]

People shouldn't need to be tied to any physical address. A virtual address should function perfectly well. This can be in the sense of a nomadic tribe, the homeless/dispossessed (of which there are far too many right now) but it can also be in the sense of the Donald Coxeters of the world, people who simply don't have conventional lifestyles.

(For those unfamiliar with Donald Coxeter, I strongly recommend learning some maths. Any maths will do.)

So what you need is a virtual address that can map EITHER to a physical location, OR a logical location (such as a tribe), OR a transient address (see the 1996 specification for IPv6), OR an Internet address. Since you want to leave room for expansion, I recommend using at least three bits to specify the address scheme.

IPv6 isn't long enough for this, although the concept is correct. The concept is that you have a prefix that tells you what you're doing, a routing segment that tells you where you're going, and a suffix that is absolutely guaranteed unique and allows you to transition to absolutely anywhere in any form without losing anything along the way.

You can't route parcels over the Internet, you can't route multicast packets by mail, so clearly you need a protocol type in there as well. There are something like eight packet-based protocols. If we leave room to expansion, you need four bits to identify the type of packet, two to identify mode (unicast, multicast, anycast, plus one spare) and four bits to identify layer 1 constraints (what you can't send over).

That's 13 bits to define the characteristics of an address. That's three bits reserved for future use to round it to 16 bits, or two bytes.

Because this scheme is independent of user and is just as valid for probes in the Kepler Belt as for people on Earth, we're going to need a more sophisticated prefix. It's hierarchical, so all routing is as local as possible. Which is great, if you can be certain of never having more than 256 downstream next hops and one upstream hop. Not really viable if part of the intermediate system (people on aircraft, trains, other planets) is ad-hoc, because you simply don't know the topology. (Yes, I'm assuming here that Joe Bloggs' laptop on a 767 can become a relay point for any packet from any source to any destination, if that offers the best routing metric for that packet.)

You need a routing strategy that guarantees that two unique endpoints can communicate over any/all multipath lines of communication by best method possible per packet. Here, IPv6' hierarchy is not so good. It assumes one path from start to end, even though the path can change without notice. Packets midstream are supposed to be redirected.

For computers, that's tolerable. For postal mail, not so much. For postal mail to a mobile endpoint, it's too expensive and risks routing loops. For anything else, it's a disaster.

The good news is that people have dealt with weird network topologies in computing and graph theory for a long time now. The bad news is the computer geeks doing this aren't interested in ad-hoc (not much call for it in supercomputing or anywhere else butterfly networks and hypercubes are used) and mathematicians aren't any further along than static coloured Petri nets. Dynamic networks aren't yet at the bleeding edge of technology.

Not to worry, if we layer an ad-hoc routing strategy below the main routing strategy, we can create a simulation of a fixed network even though the layer underneath isn't fixed and the nodes don't correspond 1:1.

However, this means we need to specify virtual waypoints on our virtually fixed network, where the waypoints are connected via the IPv6-like scheme but labelled by means of a unique, fixed designation the ad-hoc layer can use to find where to send stuff.

This assumes that your next hop wants to have a particular property, that of being able to send on to another stage that has the next designated property, and that exactly where it goes is unimportant. So it's now more of a fuzzy hierarchy

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[srmalloy]

See, everything is divided up by Prefecture, City, Neighborhood, Block, Building (floor, office) and numbered in no particular standard order for streets that are certainly not even laid out in a grid pattern.

If I am remembering correctly, there is a standard order for numbering buildings on a block -- it's the order in which the buildings were built.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[Anonymous Coward]

Address systems are difficult to change. If it was easy to change a system then all the Japanese addresses would be changed to something sane.

When the US occupied Japan, they changed the address system, putting up street signs and numbering buildings American style. Guess what happened when they left? Japan likes its address system and finds it useful. Your claim that it is not sane says more about you, I think, than Japan.

Visitors get confused by the system because they expect it to work like their own system. But it has very useful properties that western addresses lack. For instance in a western city, I could be standing on Long St, but 123 Long St could be miles away. It might even the the wrong Long St. Japanese addresses are big endian, so if I'm looking for building 1-2-3, I can go to area 1 and I *know* block 2 will be a few minutes walk at most. If I see block 1-1, I *know* block 1-2 is very nearby and 99+% the next block. Note also that blocks are quite small.

For pedestrian navigation of a dense city, the Japanese system works much better.

Open Location (Plus) Codes

[Namarrgon]

I'm surprised nobody's brought up Open Location / Plus Codes yet:

* More concise
* Language-independent
* Flexible precision (8FW4V7FW+G2 and "Paris V7FW+G2" both point to the Arc de Triomphe)
* Can refer to cities (8FW4), suburbs (8FW4V7), blocks of a few metres (8FW4V7FW+G2), or even a specific door
* Can use just the last characters for near-by locations (e.g. FW+G2)
* Unique and easily generated from lat/long
* FOSS support
* Already supported by Google Maps

Brilliant! Many parts in world don't have addr

[Anonymous Coward]

This is simply brilliant! Sometimes close enough is just that and for people trying to meet others, that can work. No landmark necessary anymore.

Costa Rica doesn't have real addresses. They are mostly relative to the local church or pizza place or pub.
"500m South and 1000m East of Tommy's Pizza" is a real address. There are 3 other homes with the same address. That means when YOUR postman is on holiday, don't expect any mail.

Japan - The numbers in addresses there are assigned sequentially, as requested for a road. 1, 2, 3, 4 .... in the order that buildings are built .... not in sequence next to each other. Forget about even/odd numbering for left/right side of the roads too.

Nepal ... packages are delivered to the local shop keeper, who many or may not phone you (better place the recipients phone number on the address of the package). I haven't any idea how they do it in rural parts of Nepal. Only know what Kathmandu is like.

Seoul, South Korea just finished reworking all their addresses to be more like America. People still use the old addresses, which made little sense, but the new addresses haven't been learned by the older people, so both are needed.

Anyway ... this is brilliant. I looked up my home and it appears there are about 8x8 squares that the house covers .. no counting the surrounding land or paved road in front. Some of the w3w choices were tacky, but some where nice and memorable. I'm looking for a way to make a square and return all the w3w options inside that grid ... would be nice to provide options for people.

The only flaw I see with this addressing is for multi-story buildings. It isn't that uncommon for people to work in 3-90 story buildings after all. ;)

Use as random domain name generator

[thisisauniqueid]

Seems like it might be most useful as a random domain name suggestion tool.

Make it 5x5 ft, please?

[excelsior_gr]

This will not only produce a finer grid, but it will also be identical to D&D squares. This will make live action soooo much more convenient.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[Anonymous Coward]

It is still missing altitude, however. I looked up my address, and the 3 words have over 100 people living at the same "address". Still a step forward, though!

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[rubycodez]

no, Japan is a first world country that could have many, many floors of a couple hundred meter or taller building at that 3x3 square. useless.

Strange choice of languages

[jrumney]

I find the choice of languages to be a bit strange. Surely the whole world will be speaking Esperanto by the time this takes off.

ISIS Internet connection

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that what ISIS provides for each of their satellite Internet connections......

Logical once you get used to it

[Anonymous Coward]

Japanese addresses aren't really so hard.

There are only two main differences from the system in the English-speaking world: (1) the order is backwards and (2) block and sub-block numbers instead of a street name. The zip code is the same thing, prefecture = Tokyo is easy, and then "Chuo ward" is the suburb of Tokyo.

Then there are districts ("Yaesu"), blocks ("1 chome") and sub-blocks ("5") in place of a street name. That's where you have to look at your map, but then, how do you work out where "Main Street" is without a map, if you don't already know? Or which end of the road "300 Main Street" is? That is, unless your city is on a grid system, in which case you have a built-in advantage.

In fact, I think the block/sub-block system makes it easier to find things. Given a map of Chuo Ward, you should be able to locate Yaesu in a few seconds. And if you're in Yaesu 1 chome 5, chances are Yaesu 1 chome 4 is nearby. In Tokyo, the hardest part can be getting to the right house number on the block, but that is the fault of the areas where homes are packed together in narrow alleyways.

Cool beans, dude!

[vjoel]

But you probably don't want to go there (https://map.what3words.com/cool.beans.dude).

Disconnect from geography

[hackertourist]

Many of those 4 billion people already have a partial address: the city or village they live in. This system throws that out.
Their algorithm also seems to be random. You'd expect people in one city to have part of the address in common, but the example shown doesn't do that. So there is no way for a human to estimate where an address may be. Horse.battery.staple could be next door to you or on the other end of the country.

Traditionally, address systems have been worked out by governments and/or postal organizations. At their best, they provide amazing accuracy. In the Netherlands, a single 7-to-10-character code (6-character post code plus house number) provides 100% address resolution.

Some systems are less robust. I can believe the UK example (£775M in incorrect addressing cost). In the UK, addresses use 3-6 lines of text because the UK Post office didn't introduce universal house numbering (so you have to identify houses by name), and because traditionally there are up to 3 names for the village/neighborhood/region.

So there is plenty of room for improvement. But I don't think this is the way to go.

Re:Disconnect from geography

[stooo]

In Japan, you can use the landline telephone number, and input that to the navi for going anywhere. It's awesome! It also means that every navi has a database of all numbers in the country.

Charging money for a hash function?

[nickweller]

Hash the latitude & longitude, and use the results to select from three lookup tables.

Re:Charging money for a hash function?

[NotInHere]

Yes precisely. The only really work they had to do was to select the word lists. That's it. Welcome to the decade of trivial startups.

A hash would be disadvantageous if it isn't bijective, because it would lead to collisions. And bijective hashes are nothing else than encryption (with a fixed key). I guess they simply use a Z-index or something.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[KGIII]

Yeah, I've only been to Japan twice and, on both trips, they had maps posted in weather protected thingies on the side of the sidewalk. At least I'm assuming that they were maps. I read nae one single word of Japanese nor understand one single character of their writing, for I am an ignorant lout. I do, on the other hand, speak a few words - enough to get some nookie and drunk. So, there's that. I am also not poor so I can hire a cute girl to translate but that didn't work out well on my last trip. Well, let's just say that it didn't work as planned. Somehow there were mixed signals and it ended up with a strangely emotional translator.

I suppose there's some risk of there being personal information that can be construed so I'll spare you the details.

At any rate, yeah, they had maps all over the place. Some were behind Plexiglas on the sides of buildings. I seem to recall there being a map in a cab or two? I wouldn't swear to it but it might have been Japan where I saw a map on the side of a bus. While surely useful, the bus was going down the road and I'm not exactly sure what the goal of the map was? That might have been China. I dunno... As I said, I just meandered around aimlessly, met interesting people, partied a bunch, and did the typical tourist things. Hiring a guide and/or translator is a nice benefit of having a few dollars. I doubt I'll return but the trips were both mostly nice.

Bad adressing?

[nospam007]

That won't fix bad addressing.
I have several companies where I order stuff who seem to write the labels off the screen by hand, otherwise it wouldn't be possible that they forget the company name, misspell my last name AND my first name and I won't even mention what they do to my french language street name.

No system will change legasthenic people at the keyboard.

Seems more like a linguistics experiment

[Anonymous Coward]

Coordinates are in 10 languages, but the words don't cross translate. So, I would need to know 10 versions of my address.

correct battery horse staple

[stooo]

My adress is : correct battery horse staple

Media field day

[Anonymous Coward]

How long before we see TV news reporters standing outside someone's house "I'm coming to you live from the home of today's accused criminal media frenzy. His three word address is great.bank.robber, so we're going to assume he's guilty."
Unless this is only a US Media problem.

How much time did you waste?

[Anonymous Coward]

How much time did you waste looking at all the addresses over your property?

What address to give out?

[Anonymous Coward]

I should be nice and give out the address of the sidewalk or driveway that leads to the street. But, I think I'm going to give out the coolest combination I can find, even if it's in a swimming pool.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[MastaBaba]

When the address needs to be that specific, three words, that only designate a smallish grid element, will need complementary information as well.

Only works with a connected device

[MastaBaba]

It's a cute and clever system. But, it only works when the user has access to a connected device. Sure, it would be possible to publish offline maps containing all three word combinations in an area, but that's hardly as useful or usable as simply publishing maps with the proper coordinates. Additionally, without a map, delivering mail in those favelas is a PITA. Shacks typically straddle the sides of hills and mountains, so even if you know where you have to be, without a map, you'll have a hard time getting there. And, if you have a map, you have coordinates, too. Meaning that the three word shorthand becomes much less relevant. Then, as the three words superimpose a grid, they don't line up with front doors. In favelas and other density populated areas, this will be inconvenient.

YES, gps coords CAN be stored efficiently

[v1]

Except that GPS coordinates require 16 digits, 2 characters (+/-/N/S/E/W), 2 decimal points, space and comma, to specify a location of the size of a housing block," writes Filloux.

I hope you don't have a title in front of your name (other than maybe "head idiot") because otherwise you're gonna need to lose it. Telling us we have to store and send GPS coordinates in human readable format is beyond laughable. It's like needing to call the library and have them fax you a page from a book because there's no better alternative.

I recently had to write software for an Arduino that interacts with a GPS and needs to track many waypoints. Anyone that works with those knows memory is extremely tight, and onboard eeprom is even worse. (most units have 1024 bytes TOTAL eeprom to use for powered-off storage) I also needed to store with good precision, at least as good as the GPS, which is substantially better than a city block. The format I settled on is total number of centiseconds. That fit the longigute and latitude into a pair of 32 bit unsigned longs, and had precision measured in centimeters. (varies on location)

But then I suppose you're trying to store that string data in unicode too, huh? "Dr."? God help us.

Ham radio did it first

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called the Grid Square system, also known as the Maidenhead Locator System.
http://www.arrl.org/grid-squares
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System

GPS coords are more precise than stated

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically the entire premise of the article and effort is wrong. GPS coordinates most definitely to not have an accuracy of "a block". Maybe they did when the GPS scrambling was still in place, but now they can certainly narrow down to 1m. There is no problem to solve.

Also, "GPS" coordinates were not defined by "GPS". They are regular coordinates on a spherical map that existed before satellites did, they accurately can point to any location in a clear way, and can be calculated via other methods.

You live WHERE?

[hucker75]

I bet you some people end up with very embarrassing word combinations.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[graphius]

I can't see why this is better than a 3d coordinate system (polar or rectangular). for most places you can ignore the altitude, but I thought lat/long solved the location problem (fine tuned by gps recently) a long time ago.

Maybe I will have to read the article....

New meme

[graphius]

This could become a game...
Pizza.delivery.store is somewhere in China....

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[Anonymous Coward]

But how do they guarantee they'll retain that square in the face of warlordism and tribal warfare?

My favorite thing about Costa Rica

[TonyNLewis]

I had an office in Costa Rica for a while. IIRC, its address was: "Banco Costa Rica, Tropicana sur, 100 metres esta, la casa esquinera con el porton negro" or "From the Banco Costa Rica Tropicana Sur branch, go 100 meters to the east. It's the house on the corner with the black gate." You don't dare repaint the gate... Many addresses downtown are specified relative to "La Coca Cola" - the old Coca Cola bottling plant, which has been closed for years, and is now a bus terminal! They actually have street names, but virtually never use them. This has been several years, so things may have changed.

Beyond Stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

If I live in the same city than someone else, then I know I can visit them (or deliver a product easily).
If someone lives in the same street, we are neighbours.
What does knowing someone's some.fucking.address give me when they are almost random?
Everytime I have to search it online.
This is beyond stupid.

Even geographic coordinates seem a far better solution.
If you encode them into alphabetic characters they should be easy to remember.
And they would still show how close to you someone else you are.

With typos and voice recognition

[Anonymous Coward]

this will be a great way to have your package delivered to a random spot in the middle of the pacific.

BFE

[bugs2squash]

so where is bum,fuck,egypt ?

Why did they use tenses?

[wad4ever]

So my address is "stays.moment.loving". (I don't care if you know where I live, don't freak out.) Which is unfortunately very different than "stay.moment.loving", or "stays.moment.love", or other variations. That's unfortunate. Did they need the extra address space that these conjugations permit? Seems more useful to be able to just translate the root words "stay", "moment", "love" to some other language and have it still work. Conjugations often don't translate well. What if they decreased the resolution to, say, 5m by 5m, could they just go by root words?

Also, you may still need a number, if you live on the 20th floor or something like that.

Another dot-bubble

[xgeorgio]

Simple math:

Earth circumference is about 40075 km associated with 360 degrees of angle (lat,lon). This means at most 111.32 km per degree, i.e., less than 31 m per angular sec. If we use GPS coords and two typical 'float' (32-bit) with epsilon accuracy at least 10e-5 we can have 5-digit decimals or roughly 1.2 m resolution, which is far smaller than the 5-8 m maximum resolution of commercial GPS.

So, with just 8 bytes we can have more than enough location registration anywhere on the Earth with the maximum available technology today. Unless these guys have found a way to pack 3 readable words in just 8 chars with no collisions whatsoever, they deserve the next Turing award - or the "bubble of the year" award in any other case.

News? For Real?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using W3W for *ages*! How is this suddenly news?

But yay for exposure, I guess.

3 alphabet system

[Anonymous Coward]

any kid knows that all you need are just "x", "y" & "z" to specify any point in the world.

Re:More likely to be used by drones than post offi

[Anonymous Coward]

You INSIST in adding up populated African villages and Mumbai SLUMS to the DELICATE framework of computing and advanced technology. I SIMPLY cannot order from AMAZON in NEW YORK because a group of WACKOS in Amazon, most likely Indians or Africans, decided to keep the LOCKERS always in FULL knowing I am the affected party and USPS, another African hub, cannot be trusted to deliver. IN, NEW, YORK, not a Mumbai slum or a populated African village. Very nice idea, but these guys should stop using the ALL POPLE TOGETHER concept to sell technology. I invented the .com, .org and .edu convention, by the way, when indexing my magazines before going into middle school, so I appreciate the idea quite much. Why don't they try solve the **one name, a million Chinese**, problem, also? I know most of those not included in our naming conventions DO NOT have an identity nor want one, besides! :-|