51–57 of 57 posts
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Not particularly reassuring, can't someone just create an open system with a similar concept and release the mapping.
>can't someone just create an open system with a similar concept There's a pretty good, working parody at http://what3fucks.com
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Only 57 trillion 3x3 meter squares to resolve...
Yes, its good to have a closer look at the numbers involved :-) I found the habitual part of Earth to be 24,642,757 square miles [0]. A square mile = 2589988.11 square meter [Google]. So that comes close to 7.1 trillion locations. It results in 7000 Gb for each byte stored. This makes me wonder if there is some kind of algorithm is involved. The location names seem randomly but might not be. Maybe its only random for…
But they do map the entire earth, including oceans.
I think it's kind of dumb that it requires a company to run, though. There are around 170,000 words in the oxford english dictionary. If you take any combination of three random words, you would have a grand total of 170,000 x 170,000 x 170,000 possible permutations, or 4,913,000,000,000,000 possible permutations.
If you only took the top 50,000 most commonly used words, then you would have 50,000 x 50,000 x 50,000 = 125,000,000,000,000 possible permutations. That's 125 trillion combinations.
Guess how much disk space a word list of 479,000 words takes up? Oh, only 4.5 megabytes. (see: https://github.com/dwyl/english-words)
It would be extremely easy to build an index of words, number them, then correlate them to GPS coordinates, all with a simple client-side algorithm.
There is literally no reason at all why this needs to be a single company in control of this. It could be a completely open source project, maintained by the community. And it wouldn't need servers, because all you would need is a small client-side app that would convert the numbers of your current GPS coordinates to/from the word list combos (which would only be a couple megabytes in size). This could be easily distributed as an android or ios app that would run completely offline.
I’ve never thought about this, but what3words could be hugely helpful for me. My house is essentially located between two streets, and the street name in the address isn’t the actual street where my mailbox is or where you’d enter the gate, so loosing packages is common and it’s hard to explain to friends how to find me
It seems like what3words is precisely as helpful as standard coordinates, with the exception that coordinates don't depend on a proprietary company.
Evaluation of Location Encoding Systems (https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation...)
I was comparing various encoding methods for a project not long ago, and one of the most informative was this article: Evaluation of Location Encoding Systems ( https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation... )
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Can using a block chain a good solution for it?
Of course! Blockchain is the solution for everything! /s