For fun, https://twitter.com/what3rudewords
FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
51–60 of 72 posts
Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
And it's rubbish for memorizing or entering quickly based on what you've heard over the phone. So much so that almost nobody I know uses it for gps in cars, they all use rather inaccurate zip codes or addresses that require a huge database on device, are fiddly to enter, are awkward to keep up to date and are very inaccurate.
Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
#53Would 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.
All the wordlists I know for these kinds of applications remove trivial homophones.
Some wordlist use words that are uniquely identifiable after some set prefix length (e.g. 4 characters) or use metaphone codes so you can type anything that sounds roughly right (e.g. keewee is the same as kiwi).
Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
#54This 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.
This is a really interesting idea. The big question is whether needing to use so many more words is worth it. If your adjectives are simple and memorable enough, then maybe it is.
Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
#55This 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.
One word from a list of 4096 words is 12 bits. Four such words would be 48 bits.
"A few disjoint lists" are the same thing as one big list if they are used identically in your generation process. There is no difference between "flip a coin, and pick from this 256-word list or that 256-word list according to the result" and "pick from this 512-word list".
If your system is to pick from a 16-word list of adjectives, then another 16-word list of adjectives, and then from one of three 256-word lists of nouns, you are generating codes of 17.6 bits, which is a bit of a downgrade from 48 bits.
Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
#56Earlier 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.
> More seriously, English is such a terrible language for this, because it's so full of ambiguities.
English is no more prone to the problem of "some words sound exactly the same as other words" than any other language.
Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
#57At least for me, when I put in my address, it finds a similarly named, but incorrect address.
Makes it a little hard to use :-/
Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or flour, flower, floor... GPS coordinates are better.
All the wordlists I know for these kinds of applications remove trivial homophones. Some wordlist use words that are uniquely identifiable after some set prefix length (e.g. 4 characters) or use metaphone codes so you can type anything that sounds roughly right (e.g. keewee is the same as kiwi).
Do they? Flower, flour, ants, hence, its, hits, tits, lead, led, lead, let, lit. It's especially hard in a language where spelling doesn't always suggest the wright pronunciation: read and read, lead and lead.
Sometimes, the combination of words can also be confusing, because you can't tell where the words end. before.head, bee.forehead.
Another issue I remember was that the plural version pointed to a different place altogether.
I used w3w (the triwords are great drawing prompts), and I had to repeat them multiple times to my friend drawing across the table. I didn't remember them after drawing them for a few minutes.
Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the wordlists I know for these kinds of applications remove trivial homophones. Some wordlist use words that are uniquely identifiable after some set prefix length (e.g. 4 characters) or use metaphone codes so you can type anything that sounds roughly right (e.g. keewee is the same as kiwi).
Do they? Flower, flour, ants, hence, its, hits, tits, lead, led, lead, let, lit. It's especially hard in a language where spelling doesn't always suggest the wright pronunciation: read and read, lead and lead. Sometimes, the combination of words can also be confusing, because you can't tell where the words end. before.head, bee.forehead. Another issue I remember was that the plural version pointed to a different plac…
Ah yes, you're right w3w has an enormous wordlist which isn't great.
The metaphone wordlist I was talking about is verbal-id https://github.com/bandrews/verbal-id#readme which shouldn't suffer from the problems you mention.
> verbalid.parse("vacant brand orchestra kiwi")
'8aab9b999'
> verbalid.parse("vaycant brahnd orchistra keewee")
'8aab9b999'
Re: FixPhrase – open-source, patent-free what3words alternative
#60I'm trying to think of a use case for such a service. Any ideas?
Telling a location over the phone when you are in an emergency comes to mind. Easier to remember than a series of numbers as is the case latitude/longitude.
> Easier to remember
Non-rhetorical question: who has to remember it and why?
Is this primarily a work-around for the problem of it not being possible for a mobile phone handset to display the location during a voice call? If so, maybe someone should fix that problem because there might be other things that the caller might want to refer to on the screen while calling.
It's slightly hilarious, in a way. I can imagine a conversation with the inventor: How much memory does a typical phone have? And you're telling me that we should use this proprietary system for encoding coordinates so that the user can more easily memorise the coordinates? Tell me, do you use a similar system for memorising your friends' telephone numbers?
Of course in the case of emergency calls it really should not be beyond the wit of man to implement a system so that the owner of a phone can configure it to automatically send its location to the other party when an emergency call is initiated. I'm fairly privacy-conscious but I'd probably enable that one.