Giving Everyone in the World an Address

Usual disclaimer for what3words: neat idea, shame the data/algorithm is closed.

In the Rio example, a postal service or courier would have to pay w3w to license the words->lat/lon lookup before they could deliver anything.

I imagine, from their point of view, that's the point.

First sentences of the article:

"Where the streets have no name," sang rock frontman Bono on one of U2's biggest hits. "It must be hell being a postman, then," came the sarcastic rejoinder from the music press.

But the system they come up with is still hell for a postman. He either remembers the 111111 three-word combinations for his square kilometer of delivery, or he can't work without an electronic device.

I see the problem, but hope that there are better solutions. Especially ones that are free: A non-free address system is absurd in my opinion, to put it mildly.

Nice idea but there is also sacrifice of the relativity of the places. Based on the calculations, looks like the order of the words are important too.

"With 40,000 dictionary words, you have 64 trillion combinations, and there are 57 trillion squares."

If the dictionary words can be doubled, the order of the words can be made unimportant too. That way it would have ~80 Trillion combinations (64 Trillion/3!) * 2^3.

I may be missing something here, but it seems like this solves only half of the problem. Sure it's helpful to cover the earth in 3m squares with unique names, but in order to actually deliver something you need to be able to navigate to it.

The advantage of a (building number, street name, locality) address is that it identifies some point on the edge of a graph, and that the edges and vertices are well-known.

I'll grant that within any locality, people generally know how to get from point A to point B (and frequently don't know the names of the streets), but it seems like what you really need is a way to map the unique 3m squares onto that knowledge.

Even with that problem solved, another problem comes up with planning deliveries efficiently. There's no information embedded in the what3words address that encodes any notion of adjacency or relative distance. I realize that this is probably intentional to reduce the likelihood of errors in addresses going unnoticed, but it means determining nearness requires access to the whole mapping data set (or at least enough to determine that a what3words address isn't in the set of ones you care about).