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FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative

fixphrase.com

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Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative

#41

Post by mejutoco »

cycomanic wrote: post #33
pornel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

w3w fails at this, because it uses words that sound similar (recede reseed, innocence innocents, and many others: https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su... ). Good luck playing spelling bee of "clairvoyants" in emergency. Some words may also be difficult to pronounce/hear/spell by non-native speakers. Unlike regular sentences, there's no context to disambiguate.

Well easy they should use German. More seriously, English is such a terrible language for this, because it's so full of ambiguities.

welcheswort.com would be a good domain for the german version ;)

Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative

#42

Post by kybernetikos »

regularfry wrote: post #39
kybernetikos wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I agree. I think that what3words hasn't spent enough effort on this, or perhaps is suffering from trying to cram everywhere into 3 words, which means the wordlist needs to be unmanageably large. Even for my attempt at the problem, I did various experiments on the word list, but an ideal attempt would check for similarity across common accents, etc and I certainly wasn't able to do that. Having said that, I thin…

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

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

Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative

#43

Post by kybernetikos »

CompuHacker wrote: post #28
ReflectedImage wrote: post #25

The work behind what3words isn't the algorithm. It's the word list used. They have linguistics who check the sounds of words, are they too similar to another word are they rude, etc, etc..

It'd be interesting to apply a Hilbert curve [0] to the Earth with the PGP Word List, with the even/odd list being used for each hemisphere, or used normally as a check. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_curve [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list

This is basically what S2 the library I use in https://wherewords.id does, except I don't use the pgp word list because it is too short and would lead to requiring too many words per place.

Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative

#45

Post by kybernetikos »

Stampo00 wrote: post #34
baal80spam wrote: post #6

I'm trying to think of a use case for such a service. Any ideas?

I agree that this is a solution in search of a problem. Don't get me wrong. It's very clever and fun. But it also suffers from a lot of problems traditional solutions like street addresses and the use of landmarks don't. Those issues have been well-documented elsewhere. The biggest issue this type of solution faces is a lack of standardization. There's this, What3Words, other people's hobbyist versions, Google has so…

This is true, but only because none of the systems have critical mass. It'd only need a couple of car manufacturers to agree on a system like this for their gps and it'd take over pretty quick.

Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative

#46

Post by zimpenfish »

Would be helpful if it accepted UK versions of the words - my current location includes "stylized" but replacing that by "stylised" (as you might well after hearing it on the phone) fails and just returns "London, vaguely".

(cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31830437 )

Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative

#47

Post by nicbou »

zimpenfish wrote: post #46

Would be helpful if it accepted UK versions of the words - my current location includes "stylized" but replacing that by "stylised" (as you might well after hearing it on the phone) fails and just returns "London, vaguely". (cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31830437 )

Or flour, flower, floor...

GPS coordinates are better.

Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative

#48

Post by nicbou »

kybernetikos wrote: post #45
Stampo00 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that this is a solution in search of a problem. Don't get me wrong. It's very clever and fun. But it also suffers from a lot of problems traditional solutions like street addresses and the use of landmarks don't. Those issues have been well-documented elsewhere. The biggest issue this type of solution faces is a lack of standardization. There's this, What3Words, other people's hobbyist versions, Google has so…

This is true, but only because none of the systems have critical mass. It'd only need a couple of car manufacturers to agree on a system like this for their gps and it'd take over pretty quick.

The GPS coordinates system has a lot of buy in already

Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative

#49

Post by trumpablehump »

yardstick wrote: post #20
kybernetikos wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it increase the risk of being slightly wrong? If anything, it helps to have consistent prefixes because you make it more likely that someone will be able to recognise areas, or know when places are near to other places. If the system allows it, you can also use fewer words to target a bigger area. For example https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/ is an area of Paris, while https://wherewords.id/juniper/de…

The risk comes from mishearing someone. Especially relevant in Europe with all the different accents. With w3w, Gare Du Nord is sunshine.frame.acted while sunshine.frames.acted is Abu Dhabi and sunshine.frame.actor is in Malaysia. https://what3words.com/sunshine.frame.acted https://what3words.com/sunshine.frames.acted https://what3words.com/sunshine.frames.actor While in wherewords.id, changing rate to fate or late o…

There are many word combination switches in close proximity in What3Words too. And if you consider sound-alikes it is worse.

What3Words is very much unsuitable for emergency situations and has been in the media for that several times.

Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative

#50

Post by thechao »

kybernetikos wrote: post #15

This is a bit like my http://wherewords.id that I made as a fun holiday project. I used the S2 cells (same as the one used by pokemon go), and my own wordlist. Using this approach, I believe I got accuracy down to squares of approximately 2x2 metres with 4 words (from a wordlist of 4096 words). FixPhrase only claims accuracy of 11m, which isn't terrible, but won't locate a single parking space or front door particula…

Why not a much shorter list with adjectives? I think the last time I looked at this, a few disjoint lists of 256 words, plus a few 16 word adjective lists gets down to ~1m accuracy. Dropping adjectives just reduces accuracy.

> big red plate, small fuzzy ball, wavy green brick

With three disjoint short lists, and two disjoint adjective lists you get permutation robustness.

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