Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
1–10 of 109 posts
Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
#2analogous to hash collision? what4words would reduce it. But you can't stop english language pluralisms (for instance) and if you start to make all plurals synonymous, you reduce the wordcount massively.
Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
#3What are the scenarios where you know the 3 words but not the lat-long?
Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
#4I don't envy the team. It's a great idea but falls short once it leaves the lab. Everything gets really dirty in the real world especially during high stress or emergencies.
Moving to four words could really help remove the need for plural and words that sound similar. Accents really do make things tough.
Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
#5It's a little weird the algorithm doesn't ensure minimum edit + soundex distance between all cell pairs.
Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
#6analogous to hash collision? what4words would reduce it. But you can't stop english language pluralisms (for instance) and if you start to make all plurals synonymous, you reduce the wordcount massively.
According to wolframalpha (Log2(surface area of earth / 9m^2)) about 46 bits of information.
Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
#7analogous to hash collision? what4words would reduce it. But you can't stop english language pluralisms (for instance) and if you start to make all plurals synonymous, you reduce the wordcount massively.
You only need a lexicon of about 700 words to get a resolution of 50m with four words, which I reckon would be good enough for rescue work (i.e. the one niche w3w has managed to establish itself in).
Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
#8I don't envy the team. It's a great idea but falls short once it leaves the lab. Everything gets really dirty in the real world especially during high stress or emergencies. Moving to four words could really help remove the need for plural and words that sound similar. Accents really do make things tough.
Yeah the general idea is OK, but the practical usage just doesn't pan out unless you remove all plurals, all words that sound similar (including if spoken with different accents), etc etc. Then you end up needing 4-5 words, most with multiple syllables, and you're back to it being just as easy to tell the lat/long or using some other system.
Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
#9W3W is a proprietary algorithm that has threatened people who published analyses of their algorithm. They got whatfreewords.org censored for publishing an independent open implementation.
It's also not well designed, as plurals and homophones are not accounted for.
Avoid using or promoting this system.
Re: Rescuers question what3words' use in emergencies
#10I don't envy the team. It's a great idea but falls short once it leaves the lab. Everything gets really dirty in the real world especially during high stress or emergencies. Moving to four words could really help remove the need for plural and words that sound similar. Accents really do make things tough.
You should envy the team. They've raised tens of millions of dollars for licensing of an algorithm that people RE'd in a day.
Their business now involves lots of bizdev droids and threatening open source implementors with baseless copyright lawsuits. It's nice work if you can get it.